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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23203594">Not Quite Right</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunartheDragon/pseuds/LunartheDragon'>LunartheDragon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>But I'm being safe with the warning, Canon-Typical Violence, Creature Jaskier | Dandelion, Demon Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion &amp; Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg Friendship, Monster Jaskier | Dandelion, Possession, Psychological Horror, Reincarnation, but not the usual kind, eldritch horror, kind of?, not super graphic violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 08:14:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>22,928</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23203594</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunartheDragon/pseuds/LunartheDragon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The meat suit ages around him. He can feel it grow every passing year, stretching and contorting over a too-big entity.</p>
<p>The original soul died far before it was born into this world. It allowed him to step in and takes its place. His brethren are like vines that choke out trees, retaining their shape even as the mighty oaks or pines wither and die beneath them.</p>
<p>He is like a weed with a lovely flower atop it. Mistaken for something meant for a bouquet, but even when identified, still plucked for flower crowns or innocent gifts.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>He calls himself Jaskier.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>130</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>973</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Russian Translation:</p>
<p><a href="https://ficbook.net/readfic/9603586">Here</a> by <a href="https://egohominilupusest.tumblr.com">egohominilupusest</a></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The meat suit ages around him. He can feel it grow every passing year, stretching and contorting over a too-big entity.</p>
<p>The original soul died far before it was born into this world. It allowed him to step in and takes its place. His brethren are like vines that choke out trees, retaining their shape even as the mighty oaks or pines wither and die beneath them.</p>
<p>He is like a weed with a lovely flower atop it. Mistaken for something meant for a bouquet, but even when identified, still plucked for flower crowns or innocent gifts.</p>
<p>Eventually this body will fail and he will move on, finding a new host. He remembers all his previous, and he will continue to remember. He likes mischief, not malice. The physical world already has enough of the latter and he finds himself falling more and more in love with this world with every life.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>He calls himself Jaskier in this life. He always gives himself another name. He’s a bard this time, traveling and experiencing with a song on his lips.</p>
<p>He meets all kinds of people. Some are so kind and jovial. Some want to spread love in ways he never understood but feels deep in his bones.</p>
<p>Some try to hurt him. Swindle him. Take what little he has. Cut him down and make off with the meager coin in his pocket and lute on his back.</p>
<p>With black eyes and black veins and fingers and claws as dark as night he faces these people down and leaves them as nothing more than stains on the side of the road.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Jaskier likes Geralt of Rivia. He has liked many individuals within his lives, but Geralt is unique. That is rare, to find someone that stands out through thousands of years of lives.</p>
<p>Geralt thinks he’s a nuisance, but sometimes looks at him strangely. Like he can’t figure him out.</p>
<p>The Witcher can tell something is wrong. Can smell the sulfur deep under Jaskier’s flowerier scents. He doesn’t understand it, though, because Jaskier doesn’t act like a threat. He simply wants to experience life and see every corner of the world.</p>
<p>“You’re not quite… right…” Geralt says once and Jaskier doesn’t look up. Doesn’t quit playing his lute, even when the beds of his nails turn black.</p>
<p>“Not quite wrong, either,” he says back and Geralt is silent.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Jaskier has no sway on physical monsters, but the incorporeal? They fear him. They know something is not quite right with him. An ancient darkness that lurks, too big a shadow for too small a frame. </p>
<p>Some have called him energumen before, but he is too old for that. Too powerful. He still walks in the shadows of fallen castles. Bones ache from cries of battles long fought. Eyes burn from the conjunction of the spheres, like it happened only yesterday.</p>
<p>He is not energumen. He is not a hag or a spirit. He is not a monster.</p>
<p>He is Jaskier. At least… this iteration is.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>His bodies always fail from old age or when they are too damaged for even he to mend. It is rare for the damage to be too great, for earthly weapons can leave no permanent damage.</p>
<p>He has held his severed head atop his shoulders and forced the skin to knit back together. He has shoved his heart back into his chest then pressed his ribcage back together. He has grown new eyes and limbs when absolutely needed.</p>
<p>Every time, his blood runs black, he stinks like volcanic rock, and all the sounds around him die out in fear for the entity that does-not-belong-too-much-too-little-too-cold-hot-choking-screaming-maiming-mending.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The art of holy infusion has been lost to time… Which is nice for him. Holy weapons are the only things that can do him harm. Not his body. Him.</p>
<p>But with a shift in beliefs, a change in knowledge, a war and “cleansing” of the lands, the practice is no more. It makes his journeys far less worrying. It is still not pleasant to be run out of towns or stabbed in his sleep or shot in the back with arrows, but he at least knows he will not perish.</p>
<p>He still has a scar on his right thigh, a deep gash, from an angelic blade suffered millennia ago. It follows him in every body he takes, a permanent marking he will always carry.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>He can smell the magic wafting off the princess the moment he and Geralt walk into Cintra’s court. It is rancid with untapped potential, forced down deep into her body, crying out for release, and growing sour and sharp with every passing day.</p>
<p>He knows it will hurt her if she does not let it out.</p>
<p>He thinks the magics of this time are a step backward from what they once were, but if he said that outloud he fears he would sound like a crotchety old man. And, after accusing Geralt of being just that, he’d rather not.</p>
<p>So he plays, avoids angry spouses, flaunts about, avoids a few more angry spouses, and does his job as a famous bard.</p>
<p>Queen Calanthe reeks of chaos, too. Not the magical kind. The kind one chooses to wield. As if, rather than inheriting the magic, she harnessed it in her blades and armor. In her words and decrees.</p>
<p>She does not hold it back, either, and it sends cold shivers down his spine.</p>
<p>He plays some more. Only bright, playful jigs, at the queen’s request.</p>
<p>When the knight arrives Jaskier can feel the curse, like the air before a lightning storm, long before the helmet is removed.</p>
<p>Duny does not wield chaos. It coats him like chains. It tethers him down to a manmade fate. It feels wrong, but more like a sore on your arm that wasn’t there before. Something to be mended. To be treated.</p>
<p>Not wrong-but-right like Jaskier.</p>
<p>He tries not to get involved, even when Geralt jumps in. The Witcher is heroic to a fault, no matter how much he says he isn’t. It may be one of the reasons Jaskier finds himself infatuated with him.</p>
<p>Not in love. Not yet.</p>
<p>But when the fighting slows, seemingly ending, and Jaskier can feel the chaos whirling around Calanthe’s intentions, he knows things are not yet done.</p>
<p>When Princess Pavetta screams, the pent up, acrid stink of her chaos erupting into something thick and crushing, everyone is knocked away. Except him.</p>
<p>He forgets to be knocked down. He stands right where he started, whirlwind ripping apart the room around them, enamored with the way Pavetta’s chaos changed upon release. It is beautiful, in a way. It makes his skin tingle like mint.</p>
<p>As he steps forward, unbothered by the maelstrom, his eyes turning black, he approaches the floating couple with a smile. He takes ahold of the princesses ankle and gives a gentle tug, somehow managing to gain her attention. She’s in a daze, enraptured with the cursed knight, and when she looks down at the black-eyed bard, she isn’t afraid.</p>
<p><b>“I think you have made your point,”</b> he says, not raising his voice yet somehow still heard over the storm.</p>
<p>Pavetta stares. And stares. And stares. Then nods before she and Duny begin to sink to the ground and the storm dies out around them.</p>
<p>Geralt won’t stop staring at him, even though his eyes are no longer black. He offers no answer, only keeps smiling, and Geralt is only distracted when Duny speaks of returning a debt.</p>
<p>When Geralt - exhausted and confused and ready to be done with the evening - calls for the Law of Surprise, Jaskier tilts his head curiously. He can feel the two souls within Pavetta long before she vomits onto the floor. Not a possession. Definitely not a possession.</p>
<p>Jaskier slips away before anyone can recover from the shock and ask him questions he doesn’t feel like answering.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Jaskier does not see Geralt for a year after that. They travel on their own, yet Jaskier can always feel the Witcher hot on his heels. Not that he is being purposefully tracked and followed, more like a tugging of souls. Heart strings tied together and pulling each other along.</p>
<p>They will meet again, he knows, so he is in no rush.</p>
<p>He travels to places long, long forgotten. To corners of the world not meant for mortal eyes. To pockets of space hidden away from wandering fools.</p>
<p>He travels.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“Jaskier,” Geralt heaves, breathless and covered in blood, both his own and the monsters’. He’s gasping for breath, sword held in one fist hanging low at his side. The night is lit only by a sliver of a moon, but Geralt can surely see everything, what with Cat running in his veins. His eyes are pitch black, skin ashen, and black veins creep over his face.</p>
<p>Jaskier’s own black eyes stare back at him, monster blood dripping from black hands held loosely at his sides, black veins arching over his shoulders and neck and chest.</p>
<p>A hoard of wyverns, a nest of them, lay dead at his feet. Some dropped dead, seemingly with no injury, others with chests burst open from the inside, others still cut clean in half.</p>
<p>All with their heads intact, so Geralt can collect what he needs. Jaskier knows the drill.</p>
<p>“I always liked this look,” Jaskier says, waggling his claws at Geralt, a smile on his face. “Copying my style, I mean. Very flattering.”</p>
<p>Geralt stares, seemingly unaware of the multiple injuries coating his body. Adrenaline is surely running high, along with whatever other potions he’s consumed prior to Jaskier happening upon him.</p>
<p>He doesn’t mind traveling at night. He needs no sleep and nothing in this world frightens him. No monster or blade, anyway.</p>
<p>It was how he happened upon Geralt fighting a losing battle and he had to step in.</p>
<p>He tilts his head when the Witcher says nothing but keeps staring. “Allow me to treat those wounds, then, yes? You’re in no state to do much of anything but sit there and look pretty.”</p>
<p>He takes a step forward but stops when Geralt raises his silver blade at him. The glare leveled at him is hot, black eyes meeting black eyes. “What are you? What have you done to Jaskier?”</p>
<p>He huffs and sets his hands on his hips, thoroughly unimpressed. “I am and always have been Jaskier,” he says, Geralt’s brows furrowing and his nose flaring.</p>
<p>“Sulfur,” Geralt says slowly, beginning to piece things together. “You’re an energumen.”</p>
<p>“Close, but no.”</p>
<p>Geralt’s eyes narrow. “Are you not a demon possessing a human body, then?”</p>
<p>“This body was stillborn when I stepped in, and I suppose the closest qualification for me, in broad terms, is ‘demon,’ but energumen is a modern term. I am older than such labels and I do not, quite, fit,” he says flippantly. “Not quite wrong. Not quite right.”</p>
<p>Geralt stares at him in silence, attempting to determine what his next course of action should be, and Jaskier grows tired of waiting.</p>
<p>“Enough with the sword, too. Silver. Steel. Platinum. Iron. Doesn’t matter. None of them will work on me,” he says and, suddenly, he’s in front of Geralt and the silver blade is back in its sheath. The Witcher’s arm is still extended and he flexes his empty hand in surprise, before lurching back.</p>
<p>“What–”</p>
<p>“Stop moving so much!” Jaskier snaps, grabbing hold of Geralt’s shoulders and shoving him to sit on the ground. “You’ll aggravate your wounds, you big lug. Let me see.” He doesn’t wait for a response, blackened hands moving to remove armor.</p>
<p>“Why didn’t you say anything?” Geralt demands as Jaskier treats his wounds, cleaning them as best he can with no stream nearby.</p>
<p>“My apologies, my dear,” he says brightly, offering a thin smile, “But, do tell me, is revealing I am an otherworldly, eldritch horror, parading around in a new flesh bag every lifetime, with powers long dead to your world, something I should reveal on the first or second date? I know I’m meant to save sex for the third, but I was never good at following that rule.”</p>
<p>Geralt glares at him and he keeps smiling, unfazed.</p>
<p>The silence stretches on for a bit until Jaskier gets Geralt standing again and making their way towards where he can sense Roach’s presence. They will fetch the wyvern heads later.</p>
<p>“I wouldn’t have killed you,” Geralt says on a whisper, beginning to sound tired a his potions wear off.</p>
<p>“You couldn’t have,” Jaskier replies.</p>
<p>“I wouldn’t have tried.”</p>
<p>“Good to know, but I enjoy living a normal life. The physical plain is an intriguing and lovely place. I do not find sharing my true nature to be of the utmost importance.”</p>
<p>“How long have you been alive?”</p>
<p>“This body has been alive for 28 years.”</p>
<p>“Not the body… you.”</p>
<p>“I am not alive.”</p>
<p>Geralt takes a deep breath, clearly getting frustrated, and Jaskier smiles to himself.</p>
<p>“How long have you been around?” the Witcher growls through clenched teeth.</p>
<p>“Long, long before the most recent conjunction of the spheres.”</p>
<p>“Most recent…?”</p>
<p>But Jaskier waves him off as they reach Roach. The Witcher’s face has returned to its natural color, the veins are gone, and his eyes are golden once more. Jaskier, on the other hand, hasn’t changed back and Roach whinnies in alarm. It’s a little insulting, but Jaskier just pauses to lock eyes with the horse and push some of his own essence towards her until she calms in recognition.</p>
<p>He smiles, pleased, then digs out the rest of the medical supplies from a saddle bag to finish patching his Witcher up.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Hope you all enjoyed! I just really, really like demon AUs and, way back in the day, demon!stiles was a huge influence for me and I wanted to bring this idea to the fandom.</p><p>Let me know what you think! I love feedback! And if you feel an urge to draw or write some demon!jaskier~ You should totally tell me about it~</p><p>Inspirational Song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8V5dAli-Q">Control - Halsey</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He had been so many things in his past. So many iterations and forms. So many bodies and lives.</p>
<p>A boy with bones so fragile he needs braces to walk, but who never dies. Never dies. Never dies. His smile bringing joy to his small village.</p>
<p>A girl, deaf, who is shunned by her family but taken in by the sirens that cannot sway her with their songs. She is vengeance on the tide, her hands louder than her tongue.</p>
<p>A man filled with anger - at the world, people, himself - who sets into motion some of the most gruesome wars known to man.</p>
<p>A woman with thunder in her steps, mighty and heroic, wearing armor forged by poor workers and wielding a damaged sword she found lodged in her father’s ribcage.</p>
<p>An elf who slips along the blood-drenched fields, washed with the screams of his people, delivering mercy upon the suffering and as his tears mix with the blood.</p>
<p>So many lives. So many timelines. So many worlds.</p>
<p>Nothing ever looks the same, feels the same, but it is always him-her-they. Returning and returning, wanting to live and learn and grow in a way his brethren refuse to.</p>
<p>He will be better.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Sometimes, when people want to get at Geralt, they choose the cowardly method of going after his bard. They believe him to be an easier target and hope for an easy prize.</p>
<p>Geralt always worries, even though he never says it. Jaskier can feel it, wafting off of him as he charges into the temporary prison and sees the dead bandits-mercenaries-fools already strewn across the ground.</p>
<p>Over the years the Witcher has learned and accepted that Jaskier has a profound talent for getting into trouble, but also getting out of it.</p>
<p>Still he worries.</p>
<p>Even when he knows of Jaskier’s true nature.</p>
<p>A group of bandits abscond with him to their camp, set to bribe the Witcher.</p>
<p>The night has barely fallen when Jaskier runs into Geralt on his way out of the bandit camp, blood smeared over his hands and face, yet his clothes miraculously untouched.</p>
<p>“Are you okay?” Geralt still demands, reeking of concern.</p>
<p>“They tore one of the buttons out of my doublet. How do you think I am doing?” Jaskier grumbles, ignoring the concern, even though it makes him feel all warm inside. Like the shadows are stretching with a brighter sun. Like some of the darkness boils back.</p>
<p>It is a good warm.</p>
<p>He does not need worrying, though. He does not need rescuing. He has been a damsel before, but he has never been in distress.</p>
<p>Still… it can be a little nice… on occasion.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Jaskier tells Geralt some of his own stories.</p>
<p>His words have been prettied and empty for so many years, the occasional story bracketed from when “Jaskier” began and the present.</p>
<p>Now, he tells Geralt anything and everything. Of worlds far beyond his own. Places hidden away unless you know where to look. History long forgotten.</p>
<p>Geralt pretends not to listen, but his awareness is firmly planted on Jaskier when he talks of these things. It appears these stories can even intrigue a grumpy, old Witcher.</p>
<p>“The monsters in your song,” Geralt suddenly cuts in one night when Jaskier is recounting his life as Damalt, a “Wastelander” from far, far away many years ago, where he hunted monsters not unlike a Witcher. “I said they didn’t exist, but…”</p>
<p>The Witcher looked deep in thought and it takes Jaskier a moment to realize he is talking about when they first met. “You were not incorrect,” he assures, smiling, “They do not exist… in this world. Alas, I occasionally get my histories jumbled up when high on adrenaline. Terrible habit, that.”</p>
<p>“It must happen often, then,” Geralt huffs. His pride is wounded. He is meant to be the monster expert, and yet…</p>
<p>“I often call out the wrong name in bed,” Jaskier replies with a shrug.</p>
<p>“That’s hardly terrible,” Geralt’s lips twist and a brow arches.</p>
<p>Jaskier shrugs. “Sure, unless you say it like, ‘G̸͙̅̀Ŕ̸̠̖ḥ̶̀͋h̸̘́K̸̥̇͒̐͛͋͗̏b̶̥͕̠̪͉͛̆ą̶̘͈̟̼̰̟̓̌̀̐T̶̝̠̙̍̽̈́̄̈́C̶̥̫̝͐̄͋́̏̀ḧ̶͍̟̟̠̫̎́̇̈́h̸̬̅́Á̸̬̱͎̗̓̃͂̇͊͠L̴͕̗͛̀̓̔̾̂̈́ͅ.’”</p>
<p>Geralt has leant back as if smacked, his eyes so wide the whites are visible all around his irises, and his mouth is hanging open.</p>
<p>It makes Jaskier laugh for five minutes straight.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>He cannot eat salt. It will not kill him, but it causes the closest thing to an allergic reaction in him that he could ever have.</p>
<p>It burns where it touches tongue or skin or organs or bone. He feels it deeper than the flesh, the body, and he writhes, like a black, foaming slug. It makes him screech but no one hears, air running cold until icicles form but no one shivers, a chittering vibration that sets ears bleeding but no one cares.</p>
<p>He cannot eat salt.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The <b>thing</b> in the mansion is ancient. Almost as ancient as him. He can hear <b>it</b> long before the mansion - dilapidated, abandoned, hopeless, taken back by nature - comes into view.</p>
<p>Geralt doesn’t hear it. He keeps walking, looking out for the monster on the contract.</p>
<p>The monster is gone, if it was ever here to begin with. Dead, dead, dead. Like the air and the earth and the sea. Dead but ancient and crawling without moving.</p>
<p>And Geralt doesn’t hear it.</p>
<p>“We shouldn’t go closer,” Jaskier finally says - voice not-quite-right at the edges, like a burning photo - because Geralt knows. Knows what he is. Accepted what he is. It is fine to speak up and protect that which he holds dear. That which he cares for more than he should.</p>
<p>Geralt is looking at him now, confusion in his eyes, and he wishes he could put into words that they need to stay away from that mansion because the <b>thing</b> inside will be the Witcher’s undoing.</p>
<p>He can move on, find a new body, find a new life, but the flesh bodies with the fleshier souls of mortals do not have that privilege. And he quite likes this particular mortal.</p>
<p>“What’s wrong?” Geralt asks, voice low, stepping towards Jaskier as if to protect.</p>
<p>“E̴v̵e̶r̴y̷t̵h̷i̶n̴g̸,” his voice twitches around something too big and forces it back down. “It will kill you. You need to get away.”</p>
<p>“Is it a spirit of some kind?” Geralt asks, his face set in concern. Jaskier offers a nod. “Is it like you?” Jaskier opens his mouth to reply and <b>it</b> rushes out.</p>
<p>
  <b>“Me but not - screaming where I whisper - the fly in your soup the fly on a corpse - bear trap on your leg gnaw it off gnaw it off - viscera from an eye split in half - war as bloody as birth - ”</b>
</p>
<p>Geralt grabs ahold of his arms and drags him away, sprinting in the opposite direction as the mansion, and Jaskier has never sensed fear on the Witcher like he does in that moment.</p>
<p>They don’t return to the town they came from. They never completed the contract. There was no monster to kill.</p>
<p>Instead, in complete silence, they make camp and Jaskier curls up tight to Geralt’s side under a thick fur. If he shakes a little, drained from a battle that never happened, Geralt doesn’t say a word and only holds him closer.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Djinn are an ancient spirit as much as Jaskier is. Not horrors, but rather entities. Embodiments. Powerful and feared and unable to flee from the imprisonments of man.</p>
<p>They hate the things that Jaskier is. Envious of him and his brethren. They are not as ancient as he, but they possess powers long forgotten.</p>
<p>Jaskier should have stopped things sooner. “I can’t sleep,” Geralt had said as he fished for a djinn. Jaskier had seen the problem, seen the issue, knew the outcome, and he should have just stepped in forced a stop.</p>
<p>Instead, he tried to talk Geralt down. Claim a lovely cup of chamomile tea with honey and whiskey would do the trick! Perhaps a back rub to sweeten the deal? Just please get away from the water. Please.</p>
<p>It doesn’t work and the jug in Geralt’s hands sends Jaskier into a panic, shooting out to grab ahold of it and tugging. Geralt doesn’t let go. Just glares at him.</p>
<p>“Seriously, Geralt, you’re being ridiculous! This isn’t going to help you. They’ll trick you and put you to sleep for good, never to rise again. How can you not see–”</p>
<p>The jug opens with a “pop!” The engraved lid in Geralt’s hand, jug in Jaskier’s, and he can FEEL the energies around them shift. Compress. Tug and squeeze until it is hard for him to breathe.</p>
<p>“Nothing happened,” Geralt growls to himself, looking around, growing more and more frustrated, but Jaskier’s attention is glued to the surface of the lake. There is a shadow there that hasn’t taken form. Watching without eyes. Laughing without lips.</p>
<p>A djinn’s aura is not a scream or a cry. It is a vibration. A roll of thunder and the long, belting roar of a giant.</p>
<p>They stare at each other, through eyes beyond this plain. Eyes that see each other for what they truly are. Wind is picking up, actual wind, the sky darkening, and with the first bolt of lightning the djinn attacks.</p>
<p>He screeches, unholy and enraged, as claws-talons-teeth, dig into the parts of him that go unseen. Black veins form on his body, growing and growing and growing, hands and eyes pitch black as he lashes back. A piece of him catches on a piece of them, rendering-cutting-ripping, until lightning flashes above like a scream. Like a scar.</p>
<p>Black oozes from his mouth with the next clash, veins surging along his face, his stomach, his legs, everywhere. His hands are grasping without moving - so many hands, too many hands - and he tears the djinn in two, flinging it away, but a bolt of lightning like a blade severs an arm. A leg. There’s a hole in his chest that bleeds black.</p>
<p>He hears a voice, deep and frantic in a way he isn’t used to. Terrified. He’s not meant to be terrified. Not for Jaskier. He…</p>
<p><em>“Stop!”</em> Geralt yells out, loud as the storm, and time holds still. The djinn is still there, present, hovering, deliberating, before it pulls back and away with a thin smile despite having no lips.</p>
<p>Ah. Geralt has the wishes.</p>
<p>Isn’t that lovely?</p>
<p>“Jaskier,” Geralt says, sounding desperate and too close and Jaskier looks to his side to find he is laying on his back and Geralt is kneeling beside him. He looks horrified, his emotions apparently so sudden and strong he is unable to hold them in.</p>
<p><b>“Hi,”</b> he says, black blood gurgling out with the word, smiling in such a way his dark eyes crinkle. He doesn’t think it puts Geralt at ease, though, with the way he seems to flicker. Stutter. Then lurch forward like he wants to hold Jaskier but stops himself short.</p>
<p>“You’re… you…” Geralt isn’t one for words, but when he does talk he doesn’t usually stutter. Jaskier doesn’t like this.</p>
<p><b>“Djinn and demons like me do not get along,”</b> he offers. He feels tight in his skin, too much wanting to leak out. To crack more of his skin and ooze free. Fill the air. Fill the world. Fill everything.</p>
<p>He holds it in, but he can feel more of his body turning dark with more and more veins. The hole in his chest hurts.</p>
<p><b>“Could you pass me my arm and leg, please?”</b> he asks kindly and, apparently too shocked to argue or question, the Witcher lurches sideways to scoop up the severed limbs. He hands them over and Jaskier takes them gratefully, before setting his arm to the bleeding stump.</p>
<p>It stinks, like rotten eggs, and Geralt’s nose wrinkles up but he doesn’t move away. Jaskier wonders if he’s in shock.</p>
<p>The limb knits back onto his body, slower than usual, but not unexpected for a wound like this. He does the same to his leg, pleased to have all four limbs back, less of himself wanting to leak out. He is still covered in black veins, though, with dark eyes.</p>
<p>Still, he turns to Geralt, who looks lost. He reaches out to lay a hand against Geralt’s cheek, the Witcher flinching but then pressing back into his palm. “See? I am fine. Death means very little to me,” he assures, his voice still full, like he has too many teeth-tongues-throats, but far more normal than it once was.</p>
<p>“You have a hole in your chest,” Geralt says lowly, seeming unable to speak much higher. Jaskier tries to think about what this must be like from Geralt’s perspective. His only friend, a demon of unknown power, changing horrifically and having a fight with an invisible force. Then, being torn apart before his very eyes…</p>
<p>Yes, perhaps this response was a bit more understanding…</p>
<p>“It will heal,” he says, but looks down at the hole, black blood gushing from it still, coating his front and back. He hadn’t gotten that from a bolt of lightning. This was a cursed wound.</p>
<p>Not enough to kill something like him, but enough to be a nuisance.</p>
<p>“I may abandon this body,” he considers aloud, “Find a new host. This will take years to heal.”</p>
<p>“No,” Geralt says suddenly, moving forward and grabbing Jaskier’s shoulders. “No. Tell me how to help. This is my doing–”</p>
<p>“This is not your doing,” Jaskier says, head tilting.</p>
<p>“I should have listened.”</p>
<p>“You should have,” he agrees, “But this is still not your doing.”</p>
<p>“Just…” Geralt looks down and away, avoiding eye contact. Jaskier still tries to catch his gaze anyway. “Tell me what I can do…”</p>
<p>“It is a magical wound,” he begins and brings a hand up to run his knuckles over Geralt’s jaw. It is so close and vulnerable, he can’t help it. “It needs magical treatment so that I might do the rest. I sense a sorceress in Rinde, the next town over. Powerful.”</p>
<p>Geralt looks up, listening intently. His face is set again, under control as it usually is, and his eyes are determined. He nods. “To Rinde,” he says as he stands and carefully urges Jaskier up, too.</p>
<p>There is a sense of vertigo upon standing and the black veins flair, spreading then receding. He feels disoriented, deep to the core. Perhaps the cursed wound was doing more to him than he thought.</p>
<p>“I think…” he begins slowly as Geralt leads him towards Roach, who is far enough away not to be spooked by the fight, but close enough to still be within sight. Geralt has a firm hand on his closest arm and the other arm wrapped around Jaskier’s shoulders, trying to support him.</p>
<p>“I think I need to pass out, now.” And he goes down to the sound of Geralt’s worried exclamation, the world blurring until it is void. It is nothing. It is all.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I actually started writing this on my Tumblr (<a href="https://lunarthedragon.tumblr.com">here</a>) and got two parts in, so here's the second chapter super fast!</p>
<p>Inspiration Song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro51SuLyh8A">Panic Room - Au/Ra</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He likes the quiet worlds. The worlds that are stuck between wars, between enlightenment, between art, between history. When people are just people, never to be written into their books or scrolls or tombs.</p>
<p>It is quiet. It is honest.</p>
<p>He thrives off the delicate moments of reality. The joy and entertainment not meant to sooth a wound. Not meant to pride over philosophy. </p>
<p>It is pure-honest-raw. Mindless laughter, never forced. A burn from an oven, not a pyre. A bruise from a toy ball, not a fist. A cut from a page, not an axe.</p>
<p>He likes these best.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>He does not wake slowly. He is unconscious and then not. There is little difference, little change, except how others perceive him, and he never cared much about that anyway.</p>
<p>His chest has been wrapped in thick bandages. Not to heal, but to keep blood off the lovely, fine sheets. The curse is gone, he can feel the push-pull on the wound has been relieved, and he begins to mend the hole.</p>
<p> There are still black veins along his bared limbs and his eyes are pitch black as they look to the sorceress sitting at the foot of the bed. Her back is to him. She does not know he is aware.</p>
<p>He recedes back into his body as the wound heals, feeling like wet wax in a mold, wanting to harden and take shape but never quite-right.</p>
<p>The black veins recede, but his eyes stay dark.</p>
<p><em>“Hello,”</em> he says, his voice an echo in his cavernous body.</p>
<p>The sorceress stills, startled, but composes herself quickly as she looks around at him. There are designs, freshly painted, on her front, and he tilts his head at them.</p>
<p>“You’re awake,” observes the sorceress, slowly standing, attempting to look bigger than she really is. Chaos envelops her like an old friend, in a way he has seen so few sorcerers and sorceresses do – too frightened, too lost, too greedy – and he straightens back up.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he says. He would usually be more talkative, but he is flayed and speaking at a distance, far away in his own body, and he would like to slip back into an unconscious state. Make his body prone and receptive. Fill in the corners of that mold and dry until he can momentarily pretend that he fits.</p>
<p>“You are—”</p>
<p>“I don’t like you putting spells on my friend,” he cuts her off, black eyes blinking slowly. He never was spectacular with his filter.</p>
<p>The sorceress arches a brow, delicate and strong in a single motion. Impressive. “Now, how would you know about that? You were asleep,” she accuses without actually accusing. Jaskier thinks he quite likes her.</p>
<p>“Was I?” he questions, lips stretching into a too-big, too-thin smile.</p>
<p>The sorceress narrows her purple eyes suspiciously, turning to pace to the other side of the bed, like a prowling panther. “You are not human,” she says, then scoffs and rolls her eyes, “Clearly. Energumen?”</p>
<p>“I really would appreciate it if people would stop calling me that,” he huffs, pouting, and adjusting to sit back against the headboard of the bed.</p>
<p>“Demon, then?”</p>
<p>“Close enough,” he shrugs, setting his hands in his lap.</p>
<p>“Certainly something strong enough to pick a fight with a djinn and survive,” the sorceress observes. “I know you do not hold the djinn’s wishes. I know it is Geralt, despite him saying otherwise.”</p>
<p>“Likely attempting to explain the wound,” Jaskier nods.</p>
<p>“Claimed a wish gone bad,” the sorceress explains, “That you’d wished never to have your heart broken again.”</p>
<p>“And he calls me the dramatic.”</p>
<p>“And now, he has done what I needed done and waits where I can easily retrieve him.”</p>
<p>“Yes…” Jaskier pauses to look around the, frankly, lovely room. “Where is Geralt?”</p>
<p>The sorceress sneers, somehow still beautiful, and says, “What? Don’t know everything after all?”</p>
<p>“Of course not, Y̸͖̓̏ẻ̵̚ͅn̶̐͜n̷̳͒ę̸̒f̴̫̽e̷̖̜͝r̷͔͚͛,” the sorceress startles as he tears her name from the void, from her chest, from the past and present and future. “If I knew everything I wouldn’t bother living in your worlds. It would all be far too boring.”</p>
<p>Yennefer storms back to the foot of the bed, a firestorm in her eyes waiting to come loose. She glares at him, glares down to the pieces of him that still remember agony.</p>
<p>“Either you will help me,” she says, warns, commands, “Or I will fetch your Witcher and use the djinn.”</p>
<p>“You will never bear children, Yennefer of Vengerberg,” he says calmly, casually, as he slips sideway and sits on the edge of the bed. His doublet and chemise are missing, likely too stained with black ooze to ever be recovered, and he begins to unwrap the bandages around his chest. His skin is whole again, no flesh scar in sight, but he still feels it. Faint and fading. A ripple to be ironed out.</p>
<p>“Excuse me?” Yennefer says, hardly more than a whisper, the firestorm within growing so hot she coats herself in ice to combat it. “You have… <em>No idea</em> what I—”</p>
<p>“You are familiar with the conjunction of the spheres?” he cuts in, not in the mood for… whatever had been winding up there.</p>
<p>“What? Yes, of course!” Yennefer snaps, sharp as icicles.</p>
<p>“I predate that. Predate your sight and your books. Your cells and your marrow,” he says lowly, looking towards the sorceress as he wraps up the black-stained bandages. Dark veins that match his eyes reappear on his shoulders and arms. Comfortable. Familiar.</p>
<p>“I have lived far more lives than you can imagine. I have experienced heartache, fury, sorrow, euphoria. I have been a mother, a father, a killer, a savior. <b>Do not claim I do not understand, for I understand more than anyone,”</b> he heaves a breath he does not need, “Speak clearly. Your wild rage falls on deaf ears until it can be wielded.”</p>
<p>“Order to my chaos?” Yennefer snarls, a memory in her eyes that Jaskier does not dwell on.</p>
<p>“Sword to your knight,” he corrects, “Scythe to your reaper. You coat yourself in it. It is the armor you hide behind, when it should be a weapon you wield.”</p>
<p>Yennefer says nothing, glaring at him, her plan falling apart around her without her even realizing. Her mind is shifting, changing, adjusting. Reconsidering.</p>
<p>“My choices were taken from me,” she snarls eventually. “Stolen from me.”</p>
<p>“Some were,” Jaskier agrees, because it is partially true. The threads of Yennefer’s past and fate not all pulling towards herself. “This one wasn’t.”</p>
<p>She looks at him sharply, taking a step towards him as if to threaten. To hurt.</p>
<p>“It was your own choice that led you to this outcome, but that is what hurts the most, isn’t it?” he says and his voice twists, thickening and bubbling out as his hands turn black, too. <b>”It was always someone else’s fault for hurting you. Abandoning you. Leaving the scars that cannot be seen. You’re used to it. Used to letting someone else take the lead. You may not give them the sword, but you bare your neck.”</b></p>
<p>“Be quiet,” Yennefer growls, taking another step closer.</p>
<p>
  <b>”But then, you finally have a choice. Your own choice. A choice with repercussions, but you take it because it is <em>yours.</em> You think you take control. You think you have rule over yourself. Yet all your actions are a cry for help. A cry for vengeance. A cry for pity.”</b>
</p>
<p>“Shut up.”</p>
<p><b><em>”You are a response, Yennefer of Vengerberg!”</em></b> he roars, the windows shaking, the candles flickering, the stones growing moss. He pauses, staring at the furious, lavender eyes before him, and calms himself. He pulls back his veins, his claws, but leaves his eyes. “You could so easily be action. You do not want your womb. A child. You want to be loved, but refuse to love yourself.”</p>
<p>“Who says I don’t love myself?” Yennefer snarls, leaning towards Jaskier, who looks up at her from his seat. Completely calm.</p>
<p>“You wear a very pretty mask. My whole life is a mask, I know what they look like,” he replies, then begins to stand. Yennefer steps back, as if she expects him to attack, but he just stands there, holding his hand out in offer.</p>
<p>“I have lived as a mother for children I never gave birth to,” he says, his voice soft, cool as frozen dew, and Yennefer stutters in her spot. Her eyes widen.</p>
<p>“How?” she demands, stepping closer again, but not taking the offered hand.</p>
<p>“Many ways. Surrogacy in some places. Adoption in others. Love in them all,” he says and Yennefer’s lips thin, apparently not liking that answer. Jaskier narrows his eyes. “A child is not obligated to love you. To care about you. And they won’t if that is all you want out of them. But to love yourself and give love, you will always have it returned.”</p>
<p>“What happened to me ‘wielding fury as a weapon’?” Yennefer snaps.</p>
<p>“I do not see why you cannot have both?” Jaskier tilts his head.</p>
<p>They are silent, his hand still outstretched, and her aura thick. Thick with the unsaid. Thick with the reconsidered. Thick with the plans she thinks she hides so well from him. Thick with power and possibility.</p>
<p>She glares at him, glares with a purple wildfire, and slowly reaches out and takes his hand.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Jaskier, after Cintra, makes sure to visit often.</p>
<p>The midday shadows are long and the night is thin, letting him bleed through the streets and alleys and people without them knowing. </p>
<p>They don’t see him come, don’t see him go, but they are resigned that he exists. That he is there. That he means no harm.</p>
<p>Calanthe attempted to throw him out the first few times she turned and he was standing beside her, but each time guards dragged him to the gate they found their hands empty as their queen’s enraged shriek echoed through the halls.</p>
<p>Eist thinks he’s funny. Jaskier likes Eist.</p>
<p>Pavetta always sees him like no one else does, sees the shadow of his shadow, the voice that curls under his skin, and she greets it like a friend. He always plays her the sweetest songs, assuring her the soul in her belly is strong and bright.</p>
<p>Then, when Cirilla enters the world, he sings for her too and makes her laugh with his tricks.</p>
<p>She has chaos in her core like her mother, not yet soured from repression, and she grows up fearless of boys or swords or dark eyes. She laughs when Jaskier flickers behind a guard, startling them when they turn. She begs him to “do the thing” and watches as a hand pushes under his skin, like pushing against a curtain, and strains the skin. He vomits black to scare off tutors when she grows tired of lessons.</p>
<p>“You spoil her more than me,” Pavetta smiles as she and Duny prepare for a trip on the sea.</p>
<p>Jaskier smells death, feels it in the back of his eyeballs, knows they will not return and the space in the shadows of Cintra will fill with sorrow and tears, red like blood. He can feel the void, closing around them, and it feels like he’s staring at a mirror.</p>
<p>It feels like him.</p>
<p>“Someone needs to,” he says instead, smiling, his blue eyes twinkling.</p>
<p>“She’s a princess,” Pavetta rolls her eyes.</p>
<p>Jaskier says nothing. He says nothing nothing nothing.</p>
<p>Only good-bye.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“Good news, Geralt!” Jaskier announces as he walks out of the mayor’s house just as the Witcher comes towards it. “I have made a lovely new friend! You met Yennefer, yes? Gorgeous sorceress? Bewitched you to harass a few diplomats?”</p>
<p>“Got me thrown in a cell,” Geralt growls, looking dubious but also incredibly tasty. Jaskier has never seen him in the leathers he wears now.</p>
<p>“Charming woman, isn’t she?” He then notices Geralt’s own eyes flicking downward. At first, he assumes he is looking at the new shirt Yennefer gave him and he puffs up, preening at the attention, but then realizes the Witcher is likely concerned over something else.</p>
<p>He reaches to pull down the loose collar of the black top and show his bare chest. Something in Geralt jumps, but it is repressed so violently even Jaskier cannot see it.</p>
<p>“I am perfectly fine. As I assured you before,” he smiles and Geralt huffs, looking away. “Now, onto the subject of that djinn. We should sort out your last two—”</p>
<p>“One. I only have one wish left,” Geralt corrects, “Blew up a guards head.”</p>
<p>“Unoriginal, but very well,” Jaskier huffs and he can feel the swell of the djinn in indignation. He doesn’t hide his smirk. He is safe from any further attacks thanks to Geralt’s first wish. “Now, as for the third and final wish… I had an idea,” he smirks even wider, thinner, and glances back at the house where he can feel Yennefer in thought.</p>
<p>Her spell had been dispelled the moment Jaskier touched her skin, and she had begrudgingly accepted that. She had not changed her mind, but she had been given much to think about. He could feel the turmoil in her head, the fire raging white but compressing into a single point.</p>
<p>It worried him.</p>
<p>He did not do well with worry.</p>
<p>“It is your choice, of course, but hear me out…” he turns back to the Witcher, who watches him closely, standing closer than seems necessary. “I worry for what she will do. I worry she will do herself too serious a grievance before she can become something greater than her past. You must be careful with your wording, but…”</p>
<p>“You want me to make a wish for her,” Geralt finishes, looking thoughtful, and his own eyes flick to the mayor’s house.</p>
<p>“It is your choice, of course, and you really must be aware how you word it, but I think—”</p>
<p>“Okay.”</p>
<p>“Okay?”</p>
<p>“Hmm.”</p>
<p>Jaskier’s eyes thin suspiciously, eying Geralt and feeling out his mind. His soul.</p>
<p>He is curious. Not like when he is given a particularly unique contract. Something lighter and sweeter. Something that doesn’t fit what Jaskier knows of Geralt, but somehow feels familiar on his skin. It’s…</p>
<p>Oh…</p>
<p>Geralt is smitten.</p>
<p>He tries to hold back his smile, but it leaks through anyway. It doesn’t feel happy. It feels anguished.</p>
<p>Geralt steps back, crossing his arms and closing his eyes, deliberating over how he wants to say his final wish. Considers for a long time. And then his lips move and the pressure in the air nearly knocks them back.</p>
<p>A storm on the ground, twisting and roaring. Something tethers, like an anchor caught on a stone. Heavy and unruly. Breaking and holding.</p>
<p>It pulls tight, braided with fire and ice. Geralt’s shadow stretches towards the sun.</p>
<p>And then the djinn is gone.</p>
<p>Jaskier feels it pulse once before it is fully free, the current taking it up, up, up. The euphoria is palpable, vibrant as a bird’s feathers. Refreshing as the open air. Warm like home cooking. Freedom.</p>
<p>Jaskier is staring up at the clear sky, clouds curling like a storm, but not with the same promise, when Geralt sucks in a sharp breath.</p>
<p>Jaskier looks at him, then follows his gaze back to the mayor’s house. The windows have been shattered from the release, but he doesn’t think there is anything to be concerned over. Still, Geralt pushes past him, speaking lowly, “I’ll meet you back with Roach,” before hurrying towards the building.</p>
<p>The tether – anchor crushing a stone, holding a ship still as a wave comes crashing down – fades as Geralt leaves. </p>
<p>Jaskier blinks. Whatever the djinn did, it clearly had nothing to do with him… But what could Geralt’s final wish have been? And how could the djinn have manipulated it for their own, malicious enjoyment?</p>
<p>The feeling of <em>finally-here-colliding-obsession-infatuation-pleasure-pain-agony</em> knocks the breath out of Jaskier and he steps back, staring up at the house in shock. Euphoria, but a different kind. A physical kind. Mounting and mounting in a way that feels too sudden. Too rushed.</p>
<p>He knows the feeling. Partakes in the feeling. Loves the feeling.</p>
<p>But this makes something in him roil and curl, contorting back and away until it pulls at his spine. Pulls at his veins like strings on a puppet. Pulls on his heart, strangling it with arteries and claws.</p>
<p>Why? Why does this hurt? Why does he care?</p>
<p>He moves without moving, the world twisting and spinning beneath him before he collapses in a field of flowers on the other side of the world. On a continent forgotten and abandoned.</p>
<p>The crushing on his heart becomes too much and he falls to his knees, raising a black, clawed hand, and plunging it into his chest. Ribs shatter like glass, red blood gushes before it turns black. Skin and eyes turn black, black, and blacker still. Not veins, an all-encompassing shadow eats over his flesh. A living-dead-vacant echo.</p>
<p>He rips out his lungs, throwing them out of the way, and tears out his heart with a shriek. He shrieks and shrieks and shrieks, black vomit and tendrils and hands erupting from his throat and his chest and his spine and his limbs. A mass of nothing and everything.</p>
<p>A single hand is held out, fingers too long, seemingly unaffected by the way the rest of him writhes and cries out. His red heart, still beating, sits in his palm, waiting and hurting and never going away.</p>
<p>He wants the end, but he cannot want himself.</p>
<p>With a shuddering, worldly crack, he pulls his hand in, cradling his heart close to the crater where it once sat.</p>
<p>Anguish. Anguish. So much anguish.</p>
<p>
  <b>It was his own fault.</b>
</p>
<p>Shouldn’t get attached.</p>
<p>
  <b>That’s why he’s here.</b>
</p>
<p>Kill the middle. End the lessons. The journey is death. The end is nothing.</p>
<p>
  <b>Take him back.</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>Take him back.</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>Take me back.</b>
</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>When he comes to, he is whole. His chest is whole and pink, like a fresh wound or a human, he forgets.</p>
<p>There are no organs in his palms, only dirt and ash.</p>
<p>Tears roll down his face. They taste like the ocean.</p>
<p>He’s crouched in a field of death and decay, dead flowers hanging over too-large corpses. Hands, larger than buildings, frozen where they fell in the distance. Ribs curve like archways over his head, closing him in.</p>
<p>He stands and turns and he is gone, smiling when Roach is there and nickers in greeting, the world green and lively once more. The mayor’s house off in the distance, but he pays it no heed. Instead, he pets the Witcher’s mare and waits. Waits. Waits.</p>
<p>A̵l̶w̶a̵y̶s̷ ̷w̴a̸i̸t̵i̵n̵g̸.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Destiny always finds a way through.</p>
<p>Jaskier only wanted to help.</p>
<p>Inspirational Song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtP6inWOKRw">Beast - 8 Graves</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He falls in love. He’s done it before. Does it often. He doesn’t see why not.</p>
<p>He is familiar with his emotions, embraced them where his brethren shun. They drape themselves in hatred, like it is finery, as if it does not stem from anger-fear-sadness. As if that makes them better.</p>
<p>He holds on. Clings to his emotions. Crushes them to his chest and lets himself be devoured.</p>
<p>He is familiar with his emotions, but sometimes he is still surprised by their intensity.</p>
<p>Sometimes they burn hot, filling his ribcage with smoke, curling his fingers like a dead spider. Sometimes they stiffen, crackle through his bones like lightning, a scream without noise. Sometimes they crush, frozen, chilling, curling his muscles where they don’t belong.</p>
<p>And he has loved. Still loves.</p>
<p>He doesn’t find it beautiful. Not like mortals do. He finds the things he loves to be beautiful, but not love. Love is work. Love is a choice.</p>
<p>Love is torture.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>He still likes Yennefer.</p>
<p>All of the voices are his, but some speak out of turn in his head. Tell him he should hate her. Hate her for taking what was never even his. For taking what was offered to her.</p>
<p>He chooses love instead.</p>
<p>It burns his every breath like charcoal.</p>
<p>She keeps trying to find a way to return her womb. Each time, “conveniently,” Geralt is travelling nearby. He comes to her rescue when things get hairy or talks her down from doing something stupid.</p>
<p>Then they go off to an inn somewhere and Jaskier tears out his heart, his lung, his eyes, his liver. He rips out what hurts-burns-freezes, screams until his spine curls and the trees in the forest he hides in die.</p>
<p>The intensity of this pain – this rejection without the rejection – he does not know how to handle. But, he should have known better.</p>
<p>He has only ever been able to hold close the ones he’s loved when they did not know his true nature. But those that know… They hate. They hate. They smell like his brethren.</p>
<p>He is lucky Geralt and Yennefer haven’t completely left him, yet.</p>
<p>So he tears and rips at himself, cracking and twisting, until he comes back to himself and nothing has changed.</p>
<p>He’ll go back to town, a smile on his face, blue eyes bright, and play for the people, jovial and loved, if just for a moment.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“You are a good person, you know,” Yennefer says, once, on a rare occasion where she and Jaskier met on their own. They drink wine and Jaskier can taste the years and tragedies it has seen.</p>
<p>“I’m not a person,” he replies, sipping at the wine.</p>
<p>“Point taken,” the sorceress shrugs, entertained by the back and forth. “You are still good, though.”</p>
<p>He pauses to linger on the chain. The tether. How it wraps around her neck and pulls, yanks, desires, and he put it there. That is his fault.</p>
<p>“I’m not that either.”</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“If you can heal from any injury, how come you have a scar on your thigh?” Ciri asks during one of Jaskier’s visits. It is winter and so many people hunker down and hide away. The winter does not concern him, however, and he travels to forbidden places. Forgotten places.</p>
<p>And sometimes he visits his friends.</p>
<p>“It was caused many lifetimes ago,” he replies, sitting on the edge of the young princess’s bed and trying to urge her to sleep. “A special kind of weapon did me damage, and now I carry it forever.”</p>
<p>“Even in new bodies?”</p>
<p>“Even in new bodies.”</p>
<p>“So…” Ciri twiddles with the edge of her sheets and furs, thinking. “When you die of old age and come back, I just have to look for someone with the same scar?”</p>
<p>“Astute observation,” Jaskier smiles proudly and Ciri beams. “Alas, I will not be exactly the same. With each life comes a new body. I fill it up and wear it like a suit, and sometimes actors take pieces of their characters home with them.”</p>
<p>“Even this body?”</p>
<p>“Yes, princess.”</p>
<p>“Then, what are you actually like?”</p>
<p>
  <b>A thrumming echo in your skull – nothing becomes something becomes nothing – the toll of war on a child – burning corpses dancing in the pyre laughing at the living – mourning a hated friend – the place between the ringing in your ear and the ringing in your bones – The figure in the corner of your sight – cut off the hand for a paper cut –</b>
</p>
<p>Jaskier tilts his head. “I don’t think you would like it.”</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>It is rare Jaskier has to come to Geralt’s rescue. The man is capable beyond words, his flesh telling a story of survival, but sometimes even he needs help. More monsters than planned. Bigger monster than usual. Abnormal activity that throws them off.</p>
<p>Usually they both end up standing, side by side, afterwards, the stench of sweat, guts, and sulfur in the air.</p>
<p>Not this, though. Never this.</p>
<p>These are not mercenaries. They are too prepared. Too knowledgeable. Too specialized. They know too much of how to down a Witcher.</p>
<p>Jaskier feels the imprint of poison in Geralt’s abandoned tankard when he comes down from prepping to perform. Geralt had been waiting for him before, but now he’s gone, and Jaskier stares into the tankard for a long, long time.</p>
<p>It wouldn’t have had a smell. Nothing a living thing could detect. It is slow acting – wafting with lazy demise – and strong enough – the thrum of war drums – to put even a Witcher out.</p>
<p>He crushes the tankard in his hand, eyes turning black, and begins to pull. Pull the memories from the patrons’ minds, yank and rip and search for his answers until every, last human in the inn collapses under the weight of his demands – alive but silent.</p>
<p>He feels the veins spreading. Spreading. Spreading until his whole body bleeds black. He forgets his mold, forgets his limitations, and he steps out. The whole village is silent, bodies laid on the ground, chests heaving, eyes shut.</p>
<p>It takes him a moment to remember to move – too many hands, claws, feet, eyes, teeth – but then he is moving and he isn’t in the village anymore.</p>
<p>He relishes in the screams of the not-mercenaries’ souls as he tears them from their bodies. Their flesh melts, bones tumble, and he holds each of the eleven souls in a hand, savoring their torment as they witness what he is.</p>
<p>“ C̵̯̦̿́̏r̸̢̪̝̞͋̏̉̃y̴̤͙̽ ̸̙̠͎̻̓́ṱ̷̤́̓͝ȍ̶̰̈́̃ ̷̪̖͍́̓͝͠y̶̛̼͋ơ̸̗̩̰̑̀̈́u̷̲͛͗̊̇r̶̞̠̓͆̓͝ ̶̥̝̓̎͛͊g̶͕͎̊̔o̵̹̬͐̃̏ͅd̸̛̼̎̿͝ș̵̹̍̒," he shrieks at them, the sky shaking, the earth bending, the moon weeping, “ T̷͉̦͉͔̂h̶̬͔͍͊̀̇͘é̸̱̄̂ẏ̷̤̺͙ͅ ̷́̂͜͝f̶̝̼̔̕e̷͍̯̭̅͠ǎ̴͙̬̙͋ṙ̴̳̰͚̞ ̵̨̛̹̳̬ḿ̶̗̟͕̂͜ȩ̵̠̐͌̎ͅ ̶̤̹̅͘m̴̰̽ŏ̵̢̲͚͐͂r̴̙̓e̶̢̋́̕ͅͅ ̸͔̝͝ṫ̶̳̯͖͂͊̕͜ḥ̸̨͋̀̎à̷̟͛͒̀n̴̜̐ ̸͚̓ẏ̸̬̀̏ͅǫ̸̻̙̫́̒u̷̦̠̭̭̓͝.”</p>
<p>He devours them, encompassing their writhing souls in inky darkness, and feels himself pulse with the power. He hasn’t been hungry in so long, but this toes at the edge of temptation. He shoves it away in favor of more important things.</p>
<p>He crouches and he is suddenly underground, in a cell, beside a prone Witcher. Geralt isn’t moving, but his organs are working too quickly. Struggling to rid itself of the poison in his system.</p>
<p>He is dying, and the not-mercenaries took him to assure no healer could help him.</p>
<p>Jaskier raises too-many-hands and lays them over Geralt’s body, pulling at the poison, calling it to his palms. Geralt jerks, spasms, as the foreign presence shifts and moves within him. Jaskier pulls it up, up, up…</p>
<p>Then opens his own mouth and spits it onto the ground.</p>
<p>He pulls back, shaking out his wrist like it was cramped, and tries to remember what a face is supposed to look like as Geralt moves.</p>
<p>When the Witcher opens his eyes, Jaskier thinks he has his body back in place, back in the right shape and dimensions, and he offers what he thinks is a small smile down at golden eyes.</p>
<p>“Hello, Sleeping Beauty,” he whispers and Geralt squints at him, confused. “Oh, sorry. It’s a fairy tale from a few worlds over. Tell you all about later, though. How do you feel? Sick? Dizzy? What do you need?”</p>
<p>“You to be quiet,” Geralt grumbles, voice rougher than usual, but there is a twitch on his lips that tips Jaskier off to his teasing.</p>
<p>“Oh! Well! Next time I’ll just leave you to the mercy of the crazy Witcher-killers, shall I?” Jaskier huffs snootily, ignoring the answering smirk from the man still on the ground.</p>
<p>“You have too many eyes,” Geralt points out after a beat, still smirking, and Jaskier blinks seven eyes at him. Oh, right, humans only had two…</p>
<p>“Bloody hell,” he curses and shuts five eyes out of existence. One nice thing about Geralt knowing his true nature… was that he could point out when he was acting more bizarre than usual. Or had too many appendages. “What would I do without you?”</p>
<p>“I’d hate to find out,” Geralt groans, finally pushing himself up. His brows furrow when he sees the mushy corpse of one of the not-mercenaries in the corner, but Jaskier waves it off.</p>
<p>Yes, Jaskier thinks, he would hate to find out, too.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Jaskier knows Borch is a golden dragon.</p>
<p>“I know you are a golden dragon,” he says to the man in his room in the tavern. Téa and Véa leap to action, clearly surprised, especially since he hadn’t been there a moment ago. Borch, also surprised, stays seated on his bed and offers a smile.</p>
<p>“And I know you to be an Angel,” Borch replies, motioning for his human bodyguards to relax. “Or is it Fallen Angel?”</p>
<p>“I am as much an Angel as I am a Demon,” Jaskier says, blue eyes crinkling. He liked meeting someone so much older than all the other mortals. They could reminisce, sometimes.</p>
<p>“How can you be both?” Téa asks, her eyes thinned threateningly.</p>
<p>“By being neither. They are simply the closest things you could use to describe me.”</p>
<p>“Then what are you, really?” Véa asks, one brow raised, and Jaskier tilts his head, smiling.</p>
<p><b>“----------”</b> his mouth moves.</p>
<p>“You didn’t say anything,” Téa accuses but now both Jaskier and Borch are chuckling.</p>
<p>“He did... But our minds are incapable of accepting what we hear. Not even mine,” Borch explains helpfully and Jaskier clicks his tongue and shoots him two finger guns. Wait. No, finger guns aren’t a thing here. Oh, well, maybe he could “invent” them…</p>
<p>“A golden dragon on a hunt for a green dragon. I’m going to suspect there is more to that story,” Jaskier hums, suddenly sitting beside Borch. Téa and Véa jump, reaching for their blades, but Borch stops them again, smiling. He might be having as much fun as Jaskier is.</p>
<p>“You have heard the saying, ‘keep your enemies close,’ yes? This green dragon… she is my mate. And she…”</p>
<p>Jaskier looks to the mountain with eyes that don’t exist, feels the thunderous sound of its forming, of the lands that clashed like armies and surged like waves into the range it now sits in. A dragon soul is a mighty thing. Ancient, but not quite like Jaskier. More ancient than elves, with a history mangled and forgotten, brimming with sorrow and rage and survival.</p>
<p>Even a weakening dragon’s soul is bright against the backdrop of this world.</p>
<p>“She is dying,” Jaskier says, turning black eyes to Borch. Black, sad eyes. “She will be dead one night before we arrive, if the poison in her system continues.” </p>
<p>Borch scowls, but then takes a deep breath to center himself. “A man named Sheepbagger stuffed a dead sheep full of his poison. I wasn’t around when she…”</p>
<p>Jaskier sets a hand on his shoulder and smiles softly. “M̷y̴r̷g̴t̸a̸b̶r̵a̶k̸k̸e̵,” he pulls the green dragon’s name from the wind, from the fire, from her slumber. “I like her and I have not even met her! So much vibrancy! Oh, and the stories she must hold. I would love to make songs of them.”</p>
<p>“She would have liked that,” Borch agrees, seeming pleased to be talking about his mate in a more positive light. Téa and Véa have taken a seat at a table nearby, watching them both curiously, their brows furrowed.</p>
<p>“Uhg, past tense,” Jaskier sneers, “What is it made of, this poison, I wonder…” he reaches out and tastes it on his tongue, in the back of his throat, burning down until his spine bleeds into his stomach. “Hemlock, definitely. Sulfur – oh, yes, I am familiar with that – and coal tar pitch. Nasty stuff. Hellebore, belladonna, and…” Jaskier halts to hack, coughing up like a cat with a hair ball, until a small object dislodges from his throat and lands in his palm, dripping black.</p>
<p>He holds it up and hums. “And tacks, apparently…”</p>
<p>He turns a bright smile to a mildly disconcerted Borch. Apparently that little display had even been a bit much for the dragon. “Good to know!” he says cheerfully, standing, and offers the room a bow. “I believe that’s all I needed. See you on the mountain!”</p>
<p>He doesn’t wait for them to reply or demand he stay and explain his behavior. He is simply gone a moment later, standing now in a cavernous room at the peak of a mountain.</p>
<p>“Hello, Myrgtabrakke,” he says to the half-alive dragon curled around her egg, “So nice to meet you!”</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Despite moving body to body, allowing one to run its course before jumping to the next, he is still able to recall the shapes of his past. He could never fully forget, not when they burn a wound into his memory, a nostalgic trauma he invited onto himself.</p>
<p>They are never quite right, either. They are the memory of a memory of a memory. Things twist and lose focus in the transition and he can’t fully get them right ever again.</p>
<p>But he has been a dragon before, millennia ago, and that is all he needs as he soars over the hunting party, bigger than the mountain they clamber towards, a hundred shrieking roars bursting from too many mouths. Black ooze curls around bones too-white, too-big, too-many, trying to look like flesh but slopping off in chunks before it clambers back on, trying again. </p>
<p>He flies above, shaking the earth as he passes, trees bending like bowing knights, and he disappears beyond the horizon.</p>
<p>Then he takes a step and he is beside Geralt, a lovely human bard once more, a smile on his face as he watches the hunting party panic over what they have just seen.</p>
<p>“You’re a menace,” Geralt says without looking at him.</p>
<p>“And you’re no fun,” he replies back, still smiling, eyes sparkling when they meet Borch’s before he is distracted by Yennefer.</p>
<p>“I will pay you good money to do that over Aretuza,” the sorceress smirks, walking up to his other side. “No need to answer. We’ll talk numbers later.”</p>
<p>Jaskier smirks at her, but then pauses, flickering, and looks back at the remnants of the party’s camp. Oh, had he been gone for a full day or two? He’d lost track.</p>
<p>“Your knight is dead,” he observes, feeling the death lingering on Yennefer’s mind and a Reaver’s dagger. Murdered, then. While defecating. What a way for a pompous knight to go.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Yennefer says, not sounding pleased, and Jaskier tilts his head.</p>
<p>“I don’t even see why you needed him. You’re powerful enough as is.”</p>
<p>“Or, she could have come with us,” Geralt grumbles and Jaskier feels a rib snap and pierce his heart, digging and plunging until blood fills his ribcage and his throat.</p>
<p>“That is—” Yennefer begins, sounding like she is about to truly snap at him, but stops herself. She takes a deep breath and then simply… walks away, a conversation on her tongue that repeats and repeats but never gets said.</p>
<p>“You made her mad,” Jaskier hums and Geralt growls in frustration before storming off after her, using the distraction Jaskier created to get ahead of the other groups while they have the chance.</p>
<p>The dwarves and Reavers are attempting to decide whether they even want to continue, but Jaskier knows it is for naught. They have nothing to lose, everything to gain. Even with the possibility of meeting what already stands beside them, they will not stop moving. </p>
<p>A man like that is a frightening thing. A promise for monsters that wear their skin and speak their words and cry their beliefs.</p>
<p>The worst kinds of monsters.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The Reavers lie as a pool of blood at his feet, his black eyes staring into the red ripples as if they still speak.</p>
<p>Geralt and Yennefer had gone off with the dwarves, Borch, Téa, and Véa on a “short cut.” Jaskier had smiled wide on his face and refused. The dwarves were not too far gone. They were desperate, but only to live. To be happy and comfortable. They could be reasoned with.</p>
<p>The Reavers were desperate for blood and their souls were already battling long before they joined the hunt.</p>
<p>Jaskier dealt with them before they could even be a whisper of a nuisance for his friends. They did not die in glory. They died in his grasp – agony and penance wasted on them – gasping for the lives they had ruined.</p>
<p>He reaches down and pulls out a blood-soaked flute amongst all the weapons that linger. He stares at it and feels regret, but it is not his own.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Borch, true name Villentretenmerth, lays curled with his mate when Jaskier takes a step and is standing in their cavern. Myrgtabrakke, the lovely green dragon, raises her head at his entrance and her eyes crinkle, pleased.</p>
<p>“You’re both adorable,” Jaskier says and Téa and Véa nearly stumble from their hiding spots at the sound, ready to strike. They relax when they realize who it is, glaring at his appearance, and now both dragons are looking at him.</p>
<p><em>You have returned my mate to me,</em> Jaskier hears within himself, the voice of the golden dragon clear as fog as if ripples through his many faces.</p>
<p>“I pulled poison out of her gut. It’s hardly romantic. I do it for Geralt more times than I’d like to admit,” he huffs, voice quivering from the rattles of the dragon’s presence inside his head.</p>
<p><em>Perhaps that is what makes it more romantic than you think,</em> Villentretenmerth smirks, which looks odd on a dragon, and Jaskier huffs, looking away, veins curling low on his neck. <em>The rest of our friends will be here tomorrow morning.</em></p>
<p>“And you all are here so early… why?” Jaskier asks. Tumbling, wind slicing at the ear, stomach and heart left above. He can feel the story in his temple, like a headache, but an interesting one.</p>
<p>“We fell off a cliff,” Véa says with a shrug.</p>
<p>“You’re almost as bad as Geralt…” Jaskier deadpans, but then smiles as he approaches the dragon, giving Myrgtabrakke as in-depth a description of how strong the soul within her egg feels.</p>
<p>A little girl, he realizes, and for a moment the green dragon isn’t a dragon, but a young woman, dripping in chaos she fears, bundled up in her core, turning sour, and the egg is a princess with a destiny bigger than her bones.</p>
<p>He wipes away the black tears and just keeps talking.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The dwarves can be convinced to leave with a few dragon teeth. Myrgtabrakke pouts about it until Yennefer, stunned still by the egg in her periphery, can be convinced to help her regrow them.</p>
<p>The egg is a shock to Geralt, too, but Yennefer is troubled when she sees it.</p>
<p>Child-mother-family-life. It hurts her when she sees it. Hurts her because of the trick she’s played on her desires. A lie smothered in sweet-smelling truth and reasoning. Has lived as a fact for so long even it forgot it was never true.</p>
<p>Jaskier watches her sadly, wishing he knew how to help. She haunts herself with things she doesn’t need. With endeavors that draw her farther and farther away from herself. He feels her agony, her desperation, the burn of her past leaking into her present like molten rock, obsidian sharpening at her edges.</p>
<p>He wishes he could help, but then he is caught in the tether, a fly in a web, and he remembers what he has done and rips free, leaving behind his legs.</p>
<p>He hovers by Geralt’s side instead. It feels safe here; contained. The shriek of the void does not follow Geralt like he thinks it does. He is peace of mind, silencing the agony of the world. Or perhaps it is just Jaskier’s agony, he has forgotten how to differentiate them.</p>
<p>They stand together on the cliff, looking out across the mountains. Borch is approaching them – on two legs with a human voice that doesn’t shove at the folds of Jaskier’s mind – but he hasn’t even left the cavern yet, so they have a few minutes.</p>
<p>“These mountains were once plains, you know,” he says, voice distant as he looks not at what is, but what was. “Before that, an ocean. There are bones of whales deep beneath these stones. If spirits roamed these cliffs, they would swim instead of walk.”</p>
<p>“Hmm,” Geralt grunts, listening, but not offering further input. That’s fine. Jaskier is used to holding conversations with himself.</p>
<p>“I always love the ocean,” he continues, head tilting. “It always… felt like me. In every world, the ocean feels the same and it feels like me.” Geralt’s looking at him through the corner of his eye. There is a cloak of fading satisfaction over him, one that lingers on Yennefer’s skin, that makes their tether not pull too tight and Jaskier tries to ignore it. Ignore the way his hands want to dig into his own chest and <em>rip.</em></p>
<p>“Why don’t we go to the ocean after this? It has been nonstop for us for a while. It would do for you to give yourself a break.”</p>
<p><b>Stay with me,</b> he doesn’t say. <b>Stay with me through lifetimes. Through hearts and flesh and souls. Stay with me.</b></p>
<p>But Geralt takes too long. He stares ahead, thinking, consideration on his tongue, when Borch cracks through their contained space and Yennefer, right behind, obliterates it.</p>
<p>He likes Yennefer, he reminds himself, choosing love for her and Geralt over and over and over again.</p>
<p>But love is not beautiful and love can fall apart.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Geralt is so rarely furious, but when he is, he isn’t a storm. He isn’t a raging typhoon or lightning bolts. He isn’t a wildfire or an eruption.</p>
<p>He is an earthquake, mounting and rippling out, crushing everything, the aftershocks lasting for hours afterwards and a tsunami on the horizon.</p>
<p>
  <em>“If I could have one blessing!”</em>
</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the tsunami was not him. It was a violent, crushing, enveloping response that he invited upon himself.</p>
<p>Jaskier refused to be the tsunami. He refused the pull of the tide as it turned red, his own blood pouring out until he runs dry. Until he gags on himself, black choking and crushing his lungs in retribution.</p>
<p>He refuses.</p>
<p>He chooses love.</p>
<p><b>“How disappointing,”</b> he heaves, blood pouring from his lips, and Geralt looks back, an aftershock in his chest, but goes still as the words and Jaskier’s appearance process in his mind.</p>
<p>He sees how Jaskier cracks, black ooze pouring from the spine that arches out of his back, hands pushing him open from inside to escape-run-mourn. Eyes open along his chest, neck, tongue, arms, arms, arms, arms.</p>
<p>Geralt’s earthquake stutters, and there is still a tsunami coming, but it won’t be Jaskier. He refuses. </p>
<p>He flickers, sees Geralt’s mouth open, saltwater on his tongue, but then he is gone before more can be said.</p>
<p>He is gone and alone and he doesn’t stop from tearing himself to pieces in hopes he can find the part that burns-cries-loves and crush it into dust.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p><b>“You shouldn’t blame Geralt,”</b> he says when he inches himself back together again and follows after the pull of another soul.</p>
<p>Yennefer had opened a portal to a lovely field, alone, mourning yet another choice taken from her.</p>
<p>She sits now in a patch of grass, knees pulled to her chest, the firestorm turned into a deluge. Her eyes are rimmed with red while Jaskier’s are still black. His chest is still a gaping wound and he cradles his beating heart in his fist.</p>
<p>Yennefer doesn’t respond to his appearance. Just turns to wipe her eyes then motions for him to sit beside her.</p>
<p>The deluge is strong, but dwindling, the embers already visible in her lavender gaze. A moment’s weakness so closely chased by screams of the damned.</p>
<p>“He tied us together. Forced our stories to never come apart. And for what? Some… idiotic hero complex? Infatuation?” Yennefer snarls, her throat thick with lightning and misery, dripping down like a lethal cut. “How am I meant to trust my feelings? Everything we felt was because of an idiotic, selfish, cruel WISH!”</p>
<p>Across the field a bolt of lightning strikes, setting the grass ablaze. The two of them don’t bother to move.</p>
<p><b>“Not quite,”</b> Jaskier admits cautiously, crushing his heart in his fist, red blood dripping through his fingers and down his black arm, before releasing it. It hesitates, uncertain, before beginning to beat again. <b>“The wish tethered your destinies together, but that is all,”</b> he explains. <b>“It is up to you to decide what that tether means. Are you destined to love each other? Hate each other? Kill each other? Avoid each other? Better each other?”</b></p>
<p>
  <b>”Destiny might lay the ground work, but you get to decide your own fate.”</b>
</p>
<p>“Destiny sounds flakey as hell,” Yennefer growls, watching with vacant eyes but churning soul as the fire on the plain begins to spread.</p>
<p><b>“Destiny is a living loophole mortals gave too much credit,”</b> Jaskier shrugs, <b>“It only has power because people give it power.”</b></p>
<p>“So, it’s not a living goddess I could convince you to go mangle for me?” Yennefer questions, an attempt for humor in the tilt of her head, but the deluge washing it away.</p>
<p>
  <b>“I’m afraid not.”</b>
</p>
<p>“Pity.”</p>
<p>The fire is getting closer to them, curling around them like an army, attempting for a flank maneuver. Jaskier follows the flames for a moment, their chaos predictable and simple, and he does not see the appeal for magic-users.</p>
<p>He sighs and looks down, forcing his heart back into his chest with a crunch of tissue and cartilage. The jagged fangs of his ribs curl back into place and flesh mends itself over the chasm. His eyes remain black, but he tries to pretend that <em>this</em> is truly his body, not something unfathomable and vacant, while still familiar and all-encompassing.</p>
<p>“I’m the reason this happened,” he says quickly, before the churning bubbles of fear mute him. “I was worried for you after we first met. I asked Geralt to use his final wish to help you.”</p>
<p>“You asked him to tie our destinies together?” Yennefer asks carefully, balancing on a log over a raging river.</p>
<p>“No…” he admits lowly, “but I could have made it more abundantly clear to watch his wording. Djinn are assholes…”</p>
<p>“So, you didn’t ask him to tie our destinies together?” she asks again, still balanced, still teetering.</p>
<p>Jaskier looks to her, thoughtful, her hair and profile lit up by raging flames that surround them but will never touch them. She looks like a phoenix, raging and ever-burning.</p>
<p>“No. I didn’t.”</p>
<p>“Then Geralt made the wish himself and he needs to face the consequences,” her voice is firm, back on solid ground, resolute. Jaskier stares at her.</p>
<p>“We both wanted to help, not just Geralt…”</p>
<p>“And you are actually trying to take responsibility for what you did,” Yennefer shoots back and Jaskier is confused. Why wasn’t she responding the way he’d expected? She should hate him just as much as she hated Geralt. Probably even moreso.</p>
<p>“But—”</p>
<p>“Jaskier,” Yennefer says sharply and a flame rises in her eyes. Just for a moment. “Just… let me be angry at Geralt right now, okay? I’ll be angry at you later.”</p>
<p>“Okay…” he breathes, surprised but grateful in a way he never expected.</p>
<p>“Sit with me for a bit?”</p>
<p>Jaskier tilts his head as he feels the deluge wash over him once more. It cries out, like a lost child, and he feels a kinship to the storm. He feels the pull to start ripping dull to an ache. A memory. </p>
<p>He sits a little closer and she rests her head on his shoulder. She doesn’t sob, doesn’t make a sound, but the drops that fall from her eyes are sharper than the rain in her soul.</p>
<p>His own screaming dulls, a faraway reminder of agony-rejection-getitoutofme, and they watch the flames around them roar, the grass beneath them turning to soot, but never close enough to burn them.</p>
<p>They both choose love.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Yennefer says she needs time alone after that and portals away.</p>
<p>Jaskier takes a step and laughs as horses startle around his sudden appearance, Roach the only one unaffected. She neighs at him and he smiles, approaching the red mare to pet her and give her treats.</p>
<p>It has been a few days now, with the mountain just behind him. Plenty of time for the Witcher to make his way down.</p>
<p>Jaskier doesn’t know what he wants to say – which is a first – but the feeling from sitting with a friend, surrounded by a field of fire, just crying, still lingers in his skull. It is a good feeling. A protective numb from the <em>ripitout</em> that bombards his heart with grief.</p>
<p>He hums a tune to Roach, petting her in all the spots she likes.</p>
<p>He’s seen many Roach’s while travelling with the Witcher – all red mares, all named Roach – and he could taste the anguish Geralt hid whenever one of them died. After the first death, Jaskier had sworn to always be present for the future ones. To sit with his friend through the grief.</p>
<p>Then, after the third, he pulled out the horse’s essence – what made her Roach, her soul – held it in the bars of his ribcage, and then planted it into the next red mare Geralt saw. It left even him weak and fragile, run thin with the effort, but always worth it when the new mare approaches Geralt like an old friend. Like she <em>knows.</em></p>
<p>Jaskier thinks Geralt suspects his involvement, but he never, ever, voices it. Just walks a little closer when Jaskier stumbles or even lets him ride on the “new” mare.</p>
<p>These are bittersweet memories, but Jaskier can’t remember if they’d been before, or only now, with an earthquake still rocking his marrow. </p>
<p>“Jaskier?”</p>
<p>He looks away from the horse, hands stalling on her neck, and his blue eyes narrow.</p>
<p>Geralt looks more haggard than usual, like a simple trip down the mountains could have ever been considered a challenge, and he’s staring at Jaskier like he’s seen a… well… Jaskier.</p>
<p>“Hello, Geralt,” Jaskier says, sounding more human than he thinks he ever has before. “About time you came down.”</p>
<p>“You’re…” Geralt pauses and just looks at him, looks him over, concern dripping like wax from his body, and Jaskier remembers how he saw him last. Coming apart at the seams and drenched in his own pain.</p>
<p>“You’re here,” Geralt finally settles on.</p>
<p>“I am,” Jaskier nods, standing up straighter. “You told me you never wanted to see me again… so, I figured, the best way to get back at you is if I didn’t leave.” He feels petty and haughty and powerful, smirking pulling sharply on his face, thinner than normal.</p>
<p>His expression tightens, however, because there are still aftershocks in Geralt’s veins and a tsunami is still coming and Jaskier refuses to be it. “Unless you’re not done throwing a tantrum, in which case we can go back to the cave and have the <em>unhatched egg</em> teach you the proper way to beha—Oof!”</p>
<p>Jaskier is cut off from his rambling as a heavy weight collides into him, nearly knocking him off balance, except thick arms are curling around his back and pulling him in close.</p>
<p>He stares into Geralt’s shoulder, his white hair tickling the side of his face, and his hands hover, uncertain. Geralt was hugging him – crushing and pulling the pieces back together, envelope-compress-adore – and he was doing it on purpose.</p>
<p>Geralt was hugging him on purpose.</p>
<p>The anguish rolling off Geralt hurts more than when he loses another Roach and it has Jaskier finally moving. Finally encircling. Finally hugging back with a power his body shouldn’t have. Geralt lets out a huff of air from the force but doesn’t complain. Just hugs tighter. Then his anguish cracks.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” Geralt whispers. Begs. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>Jaskier presses the side of his face against Geralt’s, nuzzling, loving, adoring, hurting-but-healing. “I know, Geralt.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“I know. I know, it’s okay.”</p>
<p>“No, it isn’t.”</p>
<p>“No, it isn’t,” Jaskier agrees sadly and runs his hands over Geralt’s back, “But it will be… eventually.” Another nuzzle and a press of his lips to Geralt’s jaw.</p>
<p>“Don’t think this gets you out of the lecture I had building for you, though,” he warns as an afterthought and Geralt squeezes him, crushing and cracking and hoping and mending. Slowly. Slowly.</p>
<p>“Can’t wait,” he doesn’t sound sarcastic.</p>
<p>They both choose love.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Alright, so I wanted next chapter to be the end, and there's still a few more things I wanted to do so it might be two more chapters. Huzzah!</p>
<p>Hope you all enjoyed! Let me know your thoughts!</p>
<p>Inspirational Song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB_S2qFh5lU">No Time To Die - Billie Eilish</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He doesn’t remember where he started. Or where he ended. </p>
<p>He stands in the middle of a glorious-unending-miserable-fascinating existence with no brackets on either side.</p>
<p>He thinks his earliest memory is of a cave - or is it his last? - with a child crying and bleeding and dead-but-not, hurt in a way that can only be inflicted by others.</p>
<p>The child cries to the cave and the cave answers. “You poor thing,” it says, pity and sadness rolling out like tumbling stones. “They have hurt you, those monsters. Those humans.”</p>
<p>“They won’t stop,” sobs the child. The child’s eyes are not older than their body like so many poems claim they should be. They are just abused and hurt and begging for answers that can never come. </p>
<p>“They won’t… But I can make you greater.”</p>
<p>His first-last memory, and he does not remember if he was the voice in the cave or the child.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“How often does that happen?” Geralt asks when they set up camp a few miles away from the mountain. He’s been quiet in a way he’s usually not. Considering. Worrying. Restraining.</p>
<p>Jaskier looks at him from across the fire, confused as to what the Witcher means. “Does what happen often?”</p>
<p>“Earlier,” Geralt says, then hesitates. He swallows. His discomfort feels like an itch that can’t be reached, deep under the skin, turning red. “On the mountain.”</p>
<p>“Have I been yelled at by an idiot before? Yes,” he drawls, expression bland, and Geralt flinches and looks away. There is still a tsunami coming, Jaskier refuses to be it, but he is still allowed his retribution.</p>
<p>“After that…” Geralt says lowly, looking at the fire and not Jaskier.</p>
<p>“When I was upset?” He clarifies, finding himself surprised, and furrows his brow. Geralt nods. “You’ve seen me upset before…”</p>
<p>“Not like that.”</p>
<p>Cracking. Ripping. Screaming without noise. Bleeding from a heart that doesn’t want to beat.</p>
<p>“Ah… that…” He looks to the fire too. “Do you feel worried?” It would just be his luck that after so many years, after taking a step towards healing, Geralt would start to look at him like all the others have before.</p>
<p>“Should I be?” Geralt asks, leaning forward just a bit, his eyes narrowing. “Are you hurt?”</p>
<p>“What?” Jaskier looks over at the Witcher, surprised, because what does his wellbeing have to do with this?</p>
<p>Unless that’s exactly what this entire conversation has been about and he was blinded – tying the cloth over his own eyes, ignore, flee, don’t be a fucking hypocrite – and he feels like a complete idiot.</p>
<p>Geralt worries. Worries about Jaskier when he doesn’t have to. Never has to. But he does. Jaskier should be used to it by now but it still sends his insides churning. Burning. Fluttering. Collapsing.</p>
<p>“No, Geralt,” Jaskier says, a smile, sad but honest and loving, growing on his face, “I’m not hurt.”</p>
<p>He pauses, making sure he has Geralt’s eyes, his attention. “Not anymore.”</p>
<p>The stutter that twitches around Geralt’s edges is sudden and shocking, surprising both men, until sunlight curves through the new cracks like rays through a canopy.</p>
<p>Jaskier recognizes it as relief and so, so, so much love it puts his own songs to shame.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Sometimes Jaskier flickers, twitches, and is yanked to a new corner of the universe. He doesn’t know what causes it, if it is himself or something else, but he doesn’t question it anymore.</p>
<p>It is common. Every few centuries classifies as a normal occurrence for him.</p>
<p>He tells Ciri that, once, and she giggles. She doesn’t giggle much after she lost her parents, but Jaskier has helped regrow the response in her lungs. Cultivate her happiness and love and cover her in affections royals are often denied.</p>
<p>Calanthe makes a point of telling him off, in front of other important – posturing, selfish, egotistical, cruel – people, but afterwards the guards mysteriously begin turning a blind eye to the bard that appears in their halls.</p>
<p>“What kind of places are you pulled to?” Ciri asks eagerly, her big eyes twinkling in interest, her dolls momentarily forgotten.</p>
<p>“All kinds,” Jaskier sighs wistfully, putting on a dramatic show of his exploits, “Sometimes forests. Sometimes plains. Sometimes oceans. Always for a reason.”</p>
<p>“What reason?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know until I’m done,” he replies, tapping his chin.</p>
<p>“How do you know you need to do anything, then?” Ciri looks confused and pouty, like she doesn’t really believe Jaskier, but he just smiles back at her.</p>
<p>“Sometimes all we have is a feeling. Deep in our gut. In the back of our skull. Hovering over our shoulder. We can’t see it, we’ve never heard of it, it has never been felt before. We must follow it, though, so that we may one day give it a name. Have you ever had these feelings before?”</p>
<p>“I… think so…” Ciri says hesitantly, her tiny face turning downward, her whole essence, so sharply radiant, dimming to shivers-fear-anxiety-deep breath after deep breath. Too tiny a response to too large a girl. “They get scary…”</p>
<p>“Do you fear your fingers and toes?”</p>
<p>“What?” Ciri looks up, blooms of lilies in her surprised smile. She is the smell of flowers on a breeze and Jaskier hates for it to sour. “Of course not!” she giggles, the breeze making windchimes jingle.</p>
<p>“What about your joy? Your laugh?”</p>
<p>“No!” Ciri keeps giggling, finding entertainment in the bard’s seemingly random, ridiculous questions.</p>
<p>“It’s such a silly thought, isn’t it?” Jaskier smiles to the music of the little girl’s laughter, “To be afraid of a piece of yourself? So, then, why fear the thing you have yet to name?”</p>
<p>Ciri pauses, a twitch of her face, and then she is pouting again. Thoughtful. Like a scholar but not quite.</p>
<p>“Do not fear a piece of yourself, even when it is new. Learn it. Understand it. Give it a name,” his fingers twitch, black under the fingernails, “And move on.”</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>When Nilfgaard makes a move for Cintra Jaskier feels it. He feels it like a surge, cracking and tumbling levies so carefully constructed by the hearts of man. Boarders, unseen in the earth but respected nonetheless, shatter and crumble to dust, obliterated under the war drums and thunderous rage.</p>
<p>Manifest destiny thrums through the army, tasting of bitter weeds the doctor claims are herbs. A placebo for their righteous arrogance.</p>
<p>Jaskier’s seen it so many times before and his hackles rise, teeth bared on armor-clad throats, his fury personal and unbiased all in one.</p>
<p>The army is like the nail in the coffin that splits the wood. The final judgement for something that already came and went. Opening the box for Schrödinger’s cat but the box is already empty.</p>
<p>They are like a tsunami, Cintra’s army going out to meet them like the receding tide.</p>
<p>He screams, blood in his teeth, frost in his claws, and he is gone.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“What are you doing in here?” Jaskier asks when he stands in front of the bars of a cell. The thrum above him is familiar – thin spaces for him to hide in, squeeze through, smelling familiar and alien with grief – and he doesn’t know how long he’s been gone.</p>
<p>“You’ve been gone a while,” Geralt says, eyes shut in meditation despite his mind snapping straight, like a soldier, the moment Jaskier reappeared.</p>
<p>And… apparently, he’d been gone for “a while.” Lovely, Geralt, thank you very much.</p>
<p>“I felt the Cintran army move where they shouldn’t,” he replies honestly, glancing around. No guard has noticed him yet.</p>
<p>“Fuck,” Geralt curses, opening his eyes and standing. He is agitated but not surprised. Disappointed. It hangs in the air like moss cracking the foundation of his bones. It always makes the base of his ribcage hurt, the muscles tight.</p>
<p>“They will die. I can feel it,” he continues. The void that feels like him is large as a chasm, opened under the feet of the soldiers, but they are too distracted by purpose to notice. A tear rolls down his cheek, staining his skin like soot, as the vibrant twin stars of Calanthe and Eist are engulfed.</p>
<p>“I have to find the princess,” Geralt says urgently, stepping towards the bars of his cage. Wrong. Wrong. A wolf does not belong in a cage. In a prison. It makes Jaskier’s chest hurt for a different reason. “Can you get me out of—” Geralt reaches to grasp the bars, likely to lean towards Jaskier, but his hand finds nothing and he stumbles forward into his freedom.</p>
<p>Jaskier raises his hands, grasping Geralt’s arms to steady him even though it isn’t needed.</p>
<p>Geralt blinks back at the cell, freed of the metal confinements, then looks back to Jaskier. “Do you just pick and choose when you help me?” he asks blandly.</p>
<p><em>“Depends,”</em> Jaskier replies, voice thinned by the grind of his misery, the urge to rip out the pain in his gut a tempting pull, but he swallows down stones to keep moving. He is distant, but he is here.</p>
<p><em>“Ciri is in her room,”</em> he says, <em>“Hold your breath.”</em></p>
<p>They are there, and then they are not, and then they are there again but somewhere else. Geralt stumbles, hands flying up to grasp his own head, pain like a ringing bell trilling out his ears. Jaskier lays a hand on his shoulder, ignoring the startled cries around them.</p>
<p><em>“Sorry. It was quickest,”</em> he apologizes to the Witcher.</p>
<p>“That’s what that feels like?” Geralt groans in disbelief, the tumbling of an avalanche in his stomach that wants to come up, up, up.</p>
<p>Geralt gags once, then swallows, and forces himself to stand straight and not glare at Jaskier too hard.</p>
<p>“Jaskier!” comes a gleeful voice and the bard swings around, arms already out, to catch the laughing princess as she runs at him.</p>
<p>“My favorite princess!” Jaskier replies just as gleefully and for a moment he fills into his own cracks, fitting back together again, but only for a moment.</p>
<p>“Geralt…” Mousesack says thinly, standing just behind the princess and eying the Witcher nervously. “You’re here.”</p>
<p>“Hmm,” Geralt hums, not sounding pleased at all, and giving the druid a glare that screams, ‘no thanks to you.’ Jaskier should know. He speaks Geralt’s facial language.</p>
<p>“You’re not stopping us,” Jaskier says firmly, stepping away from the princess just enough to look at Mousesack.</p>
<p>“She needs to be protected,” Geralt says, his voice holding more natural authority than Jaskier’s, which is helpful. “I can protect her. I should have done so much earlier.”</p>
<p>“What’s going on?” Ciri questions, looking around the room for answers before settling on Mousesack, her eyes confused and desperate. There is a tang to the air, sharp and bitter, left in the wake of the army’s departure, and it sits especially heavy on Ciri’s back.</p>
<p>A presence without a name.</p>
<p>“Princess Cirilla,” Mousesack begins slowly, anxious, and Jaskier tilts his head, his eyes turning black and veins bleeding under his neck and fingers.</p>
<p>“Tell her,” he bares his teeth – too many teeth, too sharp – and Mousesack and the nearby guard stutter, falter, retreat without moving. “You all should have told her so much sooner.”</p>
<p>“You had just as much an opportunity to say something,” the guard, only mildly familiar, like a face in a dream, says vindictively.</p>
<p>
  <b>”That was not my duty.”</b>
</p>
<p>A heavy hand lays on his shoulder and he takes a breath, loud and long, until the room tilts and he stops. He raises his own hand to pat Geralt’s, like the eye of a storm, calm amidst the turmoil.</p>
<p>“Too many fingers,” Geralt says lowly, before releasing him and stepping forward. Jaskier looks down at his hands, counts eighteen, then shakes them out. When he counts ten, he thinks he’s got it right.</p>
<p>The conversation has been continuing on around him and he looks up, pulls the words that have already been thrown into the silence into him so he might understand what he missed, and steps forward. Ciri looks shocked and lost, but there is so much worse under her skin. Hidden under a poorly placed rug.</p>
<p>“We have three days,” he says abruptly, feeling how the void closes in and changes course. A crack is forming under the city and he knows it will be next.</p>
<p>“Take a day to do what needs to be done,” Geralt says, looking to Mousesack, no longer asking. “After that we can at least be two days ahead of Nilfgaard.”</p>
<p>Mousesack looks to Ciri, clearly torn, pulled between his duty and his knowledge-belief-morality. Ciri looks back, pulled between her duty and her anger-confusion-anguish.</p>
<p>Jaskier looks between them and knows how this must end, and they all know too. Cintra is already lost. The only thing they can do now is minimize their losses.</p>
<p>“You know what needs to be done,” Geralt says lowly, mostly to the druid, while Jaskier’s eyes flicker to Ciri, her body stiff as her insides shatter.</p>
<p>“In the meantime,” the bard says, stepping up and hooking his arm with Geralt’s, his eyes back to blue and a gentle smile on his face, “We will wait in the guestroom down the hall. Sort through this as needed. You have some time.”</p>
<p>He pulls Geralt out of the room grudgingly, swift steps against sluggish minds. The beginning to the end to the beginning.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“H̵e̵l̶l̷o̷,̶ ̴D̵u̶n̷y̵,” he greets on an echo, standing in an office while armies clash vassals and provinces away.</p>
<p>The man, well-groomed and well-dressed, behind the desk looks up. He is familiar but not. Not quite right. Not quite wrong. He doesn’t flinch at Jaskier’s sudden appearance, as if he’s had a few years to get used to it.</p>
<p><b>”Did you know everyone thinks you’re dead? Buried under the waves with Pavetta?”</b> the bard continues, a bit more solid, a bit more himself. He stands in the corner of the room, dark and larger than the space he occupies. There is no gleam of eyes or shimmer or pale skin. He is darkness, absence, void.</p>
<p>He is furious.</p>
<p>“I am ‘Duny’ no longer,” says the man, voice aristocratic and booming. Like a toddler in a cathedral. “I am Emhyr var Emreis. White Fla—”</p>
<p>
  <b>”White Flame of Nilfgaard. Yes, yes, I know. <em>Spare me.”</em></b>
</p>
<p>Duny, because Jaskier refuses to call him anything more, straightens up, eyes thinned. “Careful, demon. Cintra may have disregarded me, but here I am seen as a proper king.”</p>
<p><b>“I preferred you as a hedgehog,”</b> Jaskier twists, like a tilted head without the head. The shadows in the room grow longer, reaching for the torches and pinching them out like candles. <b>“Or dead, for that matter.”</b></p>
<p>“I know your weaknesses, demon,” Duny continues, confidence where intellect should be. “I know what will draw you short. Years in that castle and you did not expect me to take something from your visits and stories?”</p>
<p>Another torch is pinched out and Jaskier spreads, poison in the veins, madness in a crowd.</p>
<p>“I could snuff you out with a snap of my fingers,” Duny continues and from the depths of the shadows teeth are bared, thinned into a smile. And then another. And another.</p>
<p><b><em>”I could snuff you out with less than that,”</em></b> he says just beside Duny’s ear and finally the monarch jerks, startled, and stands. He glares back at the shadows, uncertain which are real and which are scripted.</p>
<p>He bares his teeth, blunt and rounded, and hot coals fueling his justice shake, uncertain. “Nilfgaard brings prosperity to these people.”</p>
<p><b>“Nilfgaard brings death,”</b> Jaskier huffs, unimpressed, voice resounding through the room, everywhere-but-nowhere, wrong-but-right. A hand slowly creeps onto the top of the desk, black as night, staining the wood like ink. Then another. And another.</p>
<p>A hand wraps around Duny’s ankle and he seizes back, eyes wide, and the shadows surge forward. A massive, crumbling, broken face presses towards the monarch, only vaguely reminiscent of a human. A mirror. Cracked and honest.</p>
<p><b>”I allow you to live today only for what you once were,”</b> he says, massive jaw moving, unhinged and broken, dripping onto the floor. <b>”But if we meet again, if you do not make a change, I will not hesitate in plucking every bone from your body like feathers from a chicken. Your arteries will be my strings and you can finally, properly, play the part of puppet to your predecessors.”</b></p>
<p>Duny stares back at him, blood run thinner and thinner, skin beginning to sag, cartilage turning brittle. Decaying where he stands.</p>
<p>The massive face tilts, morphing like a smile, and the laugh that bursts out shivers the walls like cold on skin. Dewdrops form like goosebumps. <b>”Ah, did you hear that alliteration at the end there? I didn’t even do that on purpose! How lovely,”</b> and then he’s releasing the man, retreating and compressing back into the corner, a thing so unknown his shape has no name.</p>
<p>“There must be rules,” Duny suddenly says, moving forward, leaning against his desk until his weight creaks the bones. Something shifts the way it shouldn’t and he straightens up, clutching his hand as pain, pain, pain thrums out of his throat.</p>
<p><b>”Oopsie,”</b> Jaskier sing-songs, smirking with no mouth but too many as well. <b>“Feeling fragile there?”</b></p>
<p>“There must be rules,” Duny repeats, clutching his hand, then falling back into his seat when his legs threaten to crack and bend. “Something as ancient as you… There must be rules against interfering with our politics. Our history.”</p>
<p>Finally, the dictator was understanding just how much of a threat he was under. How little chance his armies stood if the entity before him, around him, within him, actually decided they should be eradicated.</p>
<p>Jaskier takes a step forward, pushing out of black, inky shadows like mud, his eyes pitch black.</p>
<p><b>”Oh, my dear rodent,”</b> he says, lips unmoving, purring like bug wings. <b>”It is because I’m so ancient that I don’t waste my time with rules in the first place.”</b></p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>When Queen Calanthe returns to Cintra it is to empty streets and houses. Barren walkways and stores. Buildings frozen in their last moments of life.</p>
<p>The city is a whisper in a vacant corridor.</p>
<p>Soldiers bring the injured queen up to her chambers, castle a skeleton of its former glory, where Jaskier stands alone.</p>
<p>“Your people have been evacuated,” he tells the queen as she is laid out. He looks up at the soldiers. “You should leave, too.”</p>
<p>“We will not abandon Cintra,” says a man in a captain’s uniform.</p>
<p>“Then you die for nothing.”</p>
<p>“Cintra will fall…” Calanthe heaves and Jaskier sets a hand on her stomach. A wound opens on his own center, bleeding black and red, pain taken from the powerful woman momentarily. He cannot heal this wound. It is already filled with void and death and endings. He cannot remove himself.</p>
<p>“Cintra will fall,” he agrees.</p>
<p>“But the people live on,” the Queen ripples, a stone into a pond, and her pain turns to relief. She orders the last of her soldiers to go after their people and live to fight another day.</p>
<p>“Mousesack leads them,” Jaskier explains, almost conversationally, dripping with Calanthe’s pain alongside her.</p>
<p>“And Cirilla?”</p>
<p>“Geralt has her. I will join them after. We will not allow her to fall.”</p>
<p>“Keep her safe,” Calanthe orders, weak and strong all at once, and dewdrops form in the corners of her vision. Jaskier reaches over to wipe them away. A strong woman allowed her weakness. “Keep her laughing.”</p>
<p>“We can do that.”</p>
<p>Silence. A thunderous wave in the distance. Closing in.</p>
<p>“I will fall with my city,” Calanthe says when the drums can be heard. Jaskier releases a breath and it comes out shaking. The Queen reaches up a hand to wipe dewdrops from his eyes in return.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he says, looking to the window, pinpricks of torches amidst the swarm on the horizon. “But so will they.”</p>
<p>A wicked, vicious, vengeful smile pulls at Calanthe’s lips and her hand flops back down.</p>
<p>“Good.”</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>When the army fills the empty streets of Cintra, blades aloft but bloodless, the final, manic laughter of Queen Calanthe fills the air. A surge for the castle marks their end.</p>
<p>Hands, black as shadows, large as mountains, stretch across the sky. Earth shatters like glass, buildings tumble like dominos, and the city <em>falls, crumbles, cries.</em></p>
<p>The hands press down against screams, loud like an explosion, roaring like a fire, and <em>crush.</em></p>
<p>The tsunami comes and goes and all that is left of Cintra is a fissure, a crater.</p>
<p>A void.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>He stands on the edge of the destruction, death licking at his feet and charring the grass brown.</p>
<p>There is nothing left. No army. No city. No castle. No queen.</p>
<p>The pain that blossoms has him reaching for his chest but he stops short. He wants to crush his heart, demand it stop this torture, but he can’t. Not when he holds a soul in his ribcage, dragged inside before she perished, before she was pulled somewhere not even he could reach.</p>
<p>A chance at another life. A promise at another attempt. Another cycle.</p>
<p>“I will only do this for you once, your majesty,” he says lowly, weak in every piece of himself. The essence flutters, strong as an ox and stubborn as a weed. If he isn’t careful she may even take root in his ribs.</p>
<p>He reaches out, searching for an empty vessel just as he does for himself, and releases her upon latching onto a stillborn little girl in the far, far eastern lands across the sea.</p>
<p>A new beginning. A new chance. Separate from this anguish and—</p>
<p>He cries out when something comes slicing through his hand.</p>
<p>He falls, black ripples pulsing out of him so violently his body tears and falls apart. Clutching his hand, an agony so racking it sends his screams into a new octave, the trees dying, pillars of magma erupting around him.</p>
<p>The earth bleeds with him, screaming and crying, clouds spiraling like vultures.</p>
<p>A glowing, white arrow pierces all the way through his right hand, burning out, out, out, the light as sharp as its tip.</p>
<p>A holy arrow.</p>
<p>No…</p>
<p>He scrambles, trying to rebuild his hands, collapsing and crashing, rippling and spiking with every pulse of torture like a heartbeat. </p>
<p>He cannot pull out the arrow, he simply falls apart around it. He sobs, the pain still tearing through him, and he can’t remember what eyes are, what hands are, what bodies are.</p>
<p>“Hello, J̷̖̯͎͍̗̐̉̑̈́á̸̛̮̠̫͇͒̑̕͘͜ș̵̨͈̲͖͔͖̄͑̆̿̒̀̀̍͐͝k̵̡͈̩̮͚̆ȉ̷̡̧̫̘̼͓̱̥͠e̷͔̖̍̾̊͌̈́̕̕͠r̸̛̞̙̀̅̾̔̌͛̒,” says the entity behind him and he looks, twists, forces himself into a reality he does not belong.</p>
<p>A single figure stands in the center of the crater that was once Cintra, yet his voice sounds as if he is right beside Jaskier. Or Jaskier is right beside him. He wears armor, black, with a helmet like a bird. In his hand is a bow and on his back a quiver, filled with arrows that glow as if forged by dying stars.</p>
<p>A snarl ripples over the decimated landscape, deep as the churn of the abyss. Jaskier rises, pain making him spark and jolt but fury making him <em>burn.</em></p>
<p>He pulls at the other, tears and rips until he finds the name for the body it now possesses. Severs it from the silence. </p>
<p>“C̷̘̦͇̣̟͚̦͗͐̊͊̚͘a̶̖̖̰͙̭͎̝̾ͅḧ̷̫̹͈́i̵̡͖̗̦͈͖͛ͅr̵̹͇͆̔̓̈͊͑̊̔̌̚,” he booms. His brethren. His enemy. Himself.</p>
<p>
  <b>Death – Death come to collect – Death weeping – Death free of its bonds – Death hungry, hungry, hungry – Death – Rebirth – Death – </b>
</p>
<p>Black eyes stare back at him.</p>
<p><b>“How dare you wield that weapon against me,”</b> Jaskier rattles, gnashing teeth. He remembers teeth. He needs more teeth. He makes more teeth until they dig into the earth, sparking new spurts of molten stone.</p>
<p><b>”Times are changing,”</b> replies Cahir, a cold whisper, frost inching across the ground towards the rushes of magma that still crack and bleed around Jaskier. <b>”There are no new challenges in these worlds and I am bored.”</b></p>
<p><b>”Bored of constant change? Of life?”</b> Jaskier argues back, stepping forward, leaving a print on the ground that glows hot. It isn’t human. He doesn’t know what it is.</p>
<p><b>”It is time for an end. For all of us,” </b> Cahir sighs, wistfully, and raises his bow. He takes an arrow, the smell of burning flesh and sulfur sparking through the air where he grasps the holy weapon, and notches it.</p>
<p>Black eyes take aim and Jaskier surges back, searching, latching, and pulling.</p>
<p>The arrow is released but he is gone before it can make another landing.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>When he tumbles into the gathering hall at Aretuza he gags and vomits out black. His hand, and it is a hand again, glows like fire from the hole that goes straight through it, stinking of sulfur and blood and the vacuum of space.</p>
<p>There are cries around him and he pulses, trying to retake his shape, rebuild himself, and he thinks he might be close but not entirely right. Cracks cross over his face, chest, limbs, glowing like the wound in his hand, like the earth beneath him.</p>
<p>“Jaskier!” comes a familiar voice by his ear and he clings onto Yennefer when she crouches beside him. He must be a sight if even she sounds so frightened. That’s usually Geralt’s job.</p>
<p><b>”I’m sorry,”</b> he sobs, the black tears falling from his eyes burn against his skin, like ice shards. <b>”Couldn’t let Geralt or Ciri see me like this… Please… help…”</b></p>
<p>“What is going on?” comes another female voice, powerful as Yennefer’s but not her. Jaskier is too exhausted to pull out her name.</p>
<p>“Your hand?” Yennefer asks him, then lower so only he can hear, “A holy weapon?” He nods, at least he thinks he does. His awareness slips away like water, oil staining his insides, unable to be rid of.</p>
<p>“I need to help him. Move!” the sorceress orders, the strength in her voice, power in her presence, returning like a crack of thunder. </p>
<p>“Hold on just a moment,” comes a male voice and, unfortunately, Jaskier does know who that is, memory of the man bleeding on Geralt’s mind, loud and miserable.</p>
<p><b>”Fuck you, Stregobor,”</b> he hisses, high as a kettle, vicious as a beast, before his consciousness comes to an abrupt stop.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Aight, this got out of hand. Forget my plan for chapters! I'm just gonna write till I feel accomplished!</p>
<p>Hope you all enjoy and comment if you can! They really do mean the world to me.</p>
<p>Inspirational Song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iKxR-daLCo">Fate - H.E.R.</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>+++</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Distant</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>+++</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Far away</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+++</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Where are you?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+++</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The world is so wide up here</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Blue sky blue ocean blue marble in a black bag</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>I want to go home</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>I am home I want to go home I am home I want to go home I am home</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The empty spots between the stars feel like him feel like home but it isn’t home it is birth</p>
<p>He fills up the space</p>
<p>It is almost enough room</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The marble has mold on it.</p>
<p>Land.</p>
<p>That’s what it’s called.</p>
<p>He doesn’t belong but he wants to.</p>
<p>He is a parasite struggling to keep his host alive. They were never alive. He was. He is selfish.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“I am here.”</p>
<p>And then he is.</p>
<p>+++</p>

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  <p></p>
  <div class="media-button icon_close media-killer">
    <p> </p>
  </div>
</div><p>“Jaskier?”</p>
<p>A ripple through the air, waves and crests and shattering shakes that play from-across-against drums of a new kind.</p>
<p>Noise. That’s noise.</p>
<p>New ripples, he tries to hear them, with these things called ears, but they don’t translate right. Pitches and screams that aren’t specific or purposeful. Wild and sharp and soft and sleepy.</p>
<p>Oh. Not noise. Light. He needs...</p>
<p>Eyes.</p>
<p>The space he is in is a room, and the space within that is a body. His body.</p>
<p>There is another body that is not him. Familiar. It has a title, a vibration through the air that is distinctly its. He thinks he should be able to mimic those vibrations.</p>
<p>Mouths grow along the body that is his, opening along flesh and the brick walls encompassing him.</p>
<p>
  <b>“Yennefer?”</b>
</p>
<p>The sorceress eyes the mouths on the wall. He shuts them into cracks on the mortar and she cools, jitters around her aura evening out. It feels painful-familiar against his fingers and he mimics to understand.</p>
<p><b>“Please don’t be afraid of me,”</b> he whimpers, the jittering making the noises come out like cracks in glass.</p>
<p>A scoff. Not his. “Of what? You’re a glorified slug half the time,” Yennefer says and a hand cards through something atop his head. She then holds her hand in front of his eyes and it’s dripping with black sludge. “Pull yourself together. You’re ruining my old bed.”</p>
<p><b>“It is sad in here,”</b> he whispers, not understanding why Yennefer’s old room feels so thin and broken. <b><em>“Why would you try to kill yourself?”</em></b> His hand - he hadn’t had one before - reaches out and grips her wrist, history like a marching band thrumming from the scars there. Memories forced into her skin. Not a victory. Why does it feel like one?</p>
<p>“I wanted to escape,” Yennefer replies, the honesty in her words punched out of her, but by her own force. Trust bleeds from the scars under her skin and twists along his arms like ropes.</p>
<p><b>“Escape is a start. Death is an end,”</b> he says sadly, the shards snipping her veins before his very eyes like it is happening right now-then-later-before.</p>
<p>“And I survived,” Yennefer says, running her hand over the top of his head again. It doesn’t come back slimy this time. He thinks he should be able to ---- the action.</p>
<p>Feel.</p>
<p>Oh right. Nerves.</p>
<p>Fingers through his hair feels nice...</p>
<p>“And now I’m stronger,” Yennefer continues.</p>
<p><b>“Pain sometimes just means pain...”</b> he whimpers, cuts curving over his own wrists, pulling the memory, understanding it, the desperation thick on his tongue.</p>
<p>Taste.</p>
<p>It tastes sickeningly sweet and tempting.</p>
<p>“Scars mean you survived,” Yennefer shoots back and her hand moves to his right palm. He feels thin there. He doesn’t remember why.</p>
<p>
  <b>“Scars mean you were hurt.”</b>
</p>
<p>“And that you survived,” she repeats, more forcefully, and he doesn’t think he wants to argue with her anymore. Her reality is strength and fire and survival. He clings to it and falls back into the emptiness to rest.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>When he remembers his name, Jaskier apologizes to Yennefer.</p>
<p>“Shut up,” the sorceress rolls her eyes, morning sun bright outside. “You needed help and came to me. Clearly you have some common sense in that gooey head of yours.”</p>
<p>“I’m not living that down anytime soon, am I?” Jaskier sighs, but his mouth - only one now that he remembered - curves into a smile.</p>
<p>“You oozed all over Aretuza’s ‘immaculate’ halls.”</p>
<p>“Sorry...”</p>
<p>“For what? You should have seen Tissaia’s face!” Yennefer smirks nastily and Jaskier arches a brow. Well... okay then.</p>
<p>“I’m surprised no one is trying to break down your door right now, if I’m being honest. Chaos-users tend to want to poke and prod where they shouldn’t.” He eyes the silent door across the tiny, sad room.</p>
<p>“Oh, they did,” Yennefer huffs, waving her hand dismissively, “I had to run them off. Most of them. Triss attempted to help and... well,” she pauses and eyes Jaskier with an impressed arch to her painted lips. “Stregobor got through, wanted to take a look at your insides, and apparently you showed him. He hasn’t woken up since.”</p>
<p>“An improvement, then,” Jaskier grumbles, his distaste at just the mention of the sorcerer’s name making the skin on his neck pinch and curl.</p>
<p>“What happened to you?” Yennefer suddenly cuts through his thoughts and he sags. The pinprick that runs straight through his right hand glows a faint, molten glow but it is cold to the touch. It won’t fade into a scar until he jumps to a new body.</p>
<p>Marked.</p>
<p>He is marked.</p>
<p>Again.</p>
<p><em>“Fear the man with the winged helm. He is like me,”</em> he says, throat drying like ants in his windpipe.</p>
<p>“A demon but not a demon?” Yennefer specifies, her lavender eyes narrowing. When Jaskier remains silent, a chill running over his bones until they twist together, unmoving, frozen and shattering at once. The sorceress lays a hand on his shoulder and squeezes.</p>
<p>The sun is setting.</p>
<p>“I have to leave,” she says lowly, like it’s a secret.</p>
<p>“Where?” He whispers, but there is a scratch at the back of his neck that answers him and he says, “Sodden Hill.” His brows furrow. A marching on the horizon. Distant but familiar. No longer a tsunami. Cold as an avalanche.</p>
<p>“Nilfgaard’s army is still moving. We don’t know how they survived after what happened in Cintra,” Yennefer explains, the fire in her veins thrumming, begging, wanting to join the roar of war.</p>
<p>“Didn’t survive,” Jaskier breathes.</p>
<p>Cold. So cold.</p>
<p>Familiar.</p>
<p>“The other demon?” Yennefer questions, but she doesn’t sound surprised. Jaskier swallows the ants still crawling in his throat, forces the remnants of his body back together fully. Cracks mend he’d forgotten about. Proportions adjust.</p>
<p>“How could he possess an entire army?” Yennefer curses, standing and beginning to pace, fury rippling beautifully.</p>
<p>
  <b>“Hasn’t. No bodies left to fill. This is their shadow. What remains. Not right. Not meant to be. An insult. Disrespectful. He should be disgusted with himself...”</b>
</p>
<p>“Could you do the same? Resurrect an army?”</p>
<p><b><em>“Wrong!”</em></b> He snaps, his own fury thick and oozing, insulted. <b>“It is wrong! I could devour your star when I grow too hot, but I do not! I am not... I am better. I will be better.”</b></p>
<p>He shakes his head and abruptly he is standing, staring into the corners of the room, observing how the planes mesh together.</p>
<p><b>“You can stop the army, Yennefer,”</b> he says, thinning and kind. Confident. <b>“Magic - pure magic - is not order to chaos. Or chaos to order. It is a balance, constant and eternal, like a dance. You are strong enough. You always have been.”</b></p>
<p>The corner curves, pressing, the planes no longer meshing.</p>
<p>Yennefer says something, unseeing what he sees, and eventually there is only one body left in the room. His. Alone.</p>
<p>The planes are parallel, tight and rolling, and he stares between them.</p>
<p>Cahir stares back.</p>
<p>Black eyes meet black eyes.</p>
<p><b>“Our eradication is inevitable,”</b> Cahir says, voice echoing over the icicles that make their home in his teeth. A cavern, cold and dead, bones frozen within.</p>
<p><b>“It always has been,”</b> Jaskier growls, not an echo, a boom, sparking and rumbling like a lava flow. He hasn’t felt such fury, such indignation, such personal insult in a long time.</p>
<p>It changes him, making him run hot. He has never run hot before...</p>
<p><b>“Why flee the inevitable?”</b> Cahir questions, his head tilting, looking less human than even Jaskier.</p>
<p>Jaskier has more practice at it.</p>
<p><b>“Why rush it?”</b> He shoots back, sparking, churning, rolling like thunder.</p>
<p><b>“I am tired of the wait,”</b> is Cahir’s reply, puffs of breath bleeding from his mouth, and Jaskier sneers.</p>
<p><b>“Then plunge an arrow into your own heart and leave me alone,”</b> he surges, black twisting him larger, sharper, angrier.</p>
<p><b>“We are the same. We are tired,”</b> Cahir insists.</p>
<p><b>“You are yourself and I am me,”</b> Jaskier retorts, his brethren’s misunderstanding sitting bitter in his stomach. A hive with one member. Broken and miserable and familiar.</p>
<p>
  <b>“I will end you. You are tired. It is time.”</b>
</p>
<p><b>“It is time you fucked off,”</b> Jaskier roars and the planes twist back together to a point. A corner. Jaskier is alone.</p>
<p>He is never alone.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>When Jaskier and Geralt are waiting in Cintra’s castle, in the guest room Jaskier dragged them to, it is strangely calm.</p>
<p>“War is on its way. My friends are dying. Why do I feel nothing?” Jaskier paces the room, Geralt sitting on a stool and checking over the gear he’s had returned to him. Roach has already been moved to the castle’s stables and properly spoiled.</p>
<p>“Calm before the storm,” Geralt grunts, not looking up.</p>
<p>“No... the storm is already here,” Jaskier shakes his head. There is a rush along the streets, between the shadows, as remaining soldiers and guards rush through town and order the citizens to pack and flee as quickly as possible. Dogs barking. Markets being raided. Someone has already been trampled to death.</p>
<p>“Resignation,” Geralt grunts instead. He’s only half paying attention. Everything about him - his hands, knees, eyes, back, his very hair - feels exhausted. He should be resting, but he isn’t. Jaskier doesn’t know why he isn’t.</p>
<p>“We have done what we can and can only wait now,” Jaskier considers, flickering back and forth, an afterimage left behind to turn and regard him. “Is that it?”</p>
<p>“Maybe it’s shock,” the afterimage suggests.</p>
<p>“Shock? Am I in shock? Geralt,” he turns and finally the Witcher looks up, not at all fazed by seeing his bard having a literal conversation with himself. “Have I been shocked before?”</p>
<p>But Geralt doesn’t reply. He just sighs - exhausted - and stands. He sets his gear aside and approaches Jaskier. “What’s wrong, Jaskier? What’s really wrong?” He questions, standing before the more solid image of the-a-his bard.</p>
<p>The afterimage melts away.</p>
<p>“I... I don’t know,” Jaskier looks up at Geralt, catching his yellow eyes with his blue. “I feel like I’m falling apart, but I haven’t done anything wrong... lately... have I?”</p>
<p>“Hmm,” Geralt’s head tilts, eying Jaskier quietly, before bringing a hand up to lay it against the side of Jaskier’s jaw.</p>
<p>They have touched before, sometimes kindly, sometimes not, but the feel of Geralt, in all possible ways, always had a particular air to it. Thick like fog. Obscuring to the eye, but thin to the body.</p>
<p>Like the crash of waves, not the whole ocean. Constant and powerful, growing with the call of another, giving life to tiny tide pools forgotten by the fishermen. Loving but intimidating. Fun for the child with a creative mind, fleeing-returning-fleeing-returning.</p>
<p>For some reason, Jaskier doesn’t feel that. He doesn’t feel anything. He reaches out and all he feels is exhaustion - a fight against the unbeatable, hooks in eyelashes yanking down, down, down, compressing insides into a single, tumbling, writhing mass of desperation.</p>
<p>He’d assumed it was Geralt’s.</p>
<p>“I think I’m tired,” Jaskier whispers in realization.</p>
<p>“You’ve been tired before,” Geralt grunts, but he doesn’t remove his hand like Jaskier expects him to. He just runs his thumb - callused and tough, woven baskets - over Jaskier’s skin. The distant crashing of waves fills his ears.</p>
<p>“My body has been. I...” Jaskier hesitates, looks down at his hands. They are black, nails extended, vicious. He hadn’t noticed. How long? “<em>I</em> haven’t been tired for a very long time.”</p>
<p>“Even ethereal not-demons have to take a nap sometimes,” Geralt hums and the twist of his words makes Jaskier finally look up at him. He’s smile-smirking-happy-teasing. It pulls at Jaskier like... like... oh, he’s never felt this before. Never before in his eternal life. It is a feeling of its own and it sets his insides flipping and freezing and burning.</p>
<p>Oh.</p>
<p>“Witchers should take naps, too,” he fires back, his breath wavering in his chest because... oh.</p>
<p>He always knew. He always felt it. He saw it growing and taking hold within him, growing over his bones like vines on the walls of ruins. Life molding against death. But to look back and realize he is past the point of no return, sprinted past it long, long ago without care, to the point he does not recall what it was like beforehand... To realize this is a slap to his idiotic, blind face.</p>
<p>He has loved before. Has loved so fully it ached. Loved until he felt liberation as he was locked in a cage. Loved like a key, freedom and imprisonment. Loved as a living thing should do.</p>
<p>This is none of those times. This is a love deeper than his body. Deeper than what he has learned and mimicked as a man-woman-child-soldier-heir-peasant.</p>
<p>Oh.</p>
<p>It is... strange. To realize where he stands, to love another so deeply it feels familiar when it is new. “Ah, of course, it is you,” he wants to say, but smiles instead as Geralt rolls his eyes.</p>
<p>“Don’t need it,” Geralt huffs. He tries to lower his hand and Jaskier snatches it. Holds it in his own and smiles a little brighter. He’s so tired, but things feel clearer now. Drowning in a clear pool.</p>
<p>“You know I can feel how tired you are, right?” he says, like it’s a secret. Like Geralt’s feelings are some quiet thing they keep to themselves. Geralt’s grip tightens on Jaskier’s hand and his eyes narrow. “Come on. We have time, remember? And then we’ll get you and the lovely Cirilla out of here and you can be the emotionally stinted father you were born to be.”</p>
<p>He tugs, a light thing, light enough Geralt could easily break free, but is rewarded by the Witcher slowly following that pull towards the bed. Jaskier wonders where, along the line, in his frantic, desperate sprint to chase Geralt - keep him, hold him, be a part of his life - he earned the right to nudge him around. Not push, Geralt would push back, but nudge. Certainly nudge.</p>
<p>“Sleep, Geralt,” Jaskier says, low, quiet, back to telling secrets, and the remnants of Geralt’s resolve bleed away with his sigh. </p>
<p>Geralt is not weak, but he choses to be for Jaskier. Allows moments of weakness - not true weakness, but <em>he</em> believes they are, and that’s what matters - at the bard’s nudging, yearning, caring. He sighs. He falls.</p>
<p>And ever since the mountain he <em>glows</em> with that love he refuses to put into words, a halo of self-doubt, a devouring thing, chewing at the edges of that love.</p>
<p>Jaskier tugs him onto the bed and they both fall into much needed slumber.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>When Jaskier vanishes from Aretuza, a layer of chaos clinging to his skin like soot, he feels relief. Yennefer is his friend, but he does not like that place. It is a muddled place of death and confusion and lessons that are passed down and down and down until right and wrong muddle and mix into nothing.</p>
<p>He steps and Roach is there, not even making a noise at him, but instead nudging him in greeting. He smiles and gives her a carrot he hadn’t had before.</p>
<p>“Jaskier!” comes a gleeful voice and he turns in time to see Ciri rushing towards him. He envelops her in a hug, tight and desperate, tears in the air but unshed, and the shake in his bones, the weariness, nearly has him toppling over.</p>
<p>His right hand throbs.</p>
<p>“Hello, Princess,” he whispers, smiling down at her blonde head. She is shaking, tumbling, forcing herself to stay together, like the brave warrior she shouldn’t have to be.</p>
<p>“Jaskier,” comes a softer voice. Jaskier’s ears are new, rebuilt, and it is one of the sweetest things to grace them since he remembered what they are. He looks up and has little time to brace himself as Geralt is suddenly <em>there</em> and wrapping his arms around both his bard and his child surprise.</p>
<p>Jaskier sighs, sagging, just a little, and puts his weight in the Witcher’s hands. Geralt takes it, takes the burden, holds him close, and drags him towards the small campsite he’s managed to make.</p>
<p>They sit on someone’s bedroll - feels new and fluffy, not Geralt’s - with Jaskier leaning against his Witcher, and Ciri leaning against Jaskier.</p>
<p>“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Ciri whispers, on the verge of a whimper, a timid crawl towards desperate, but she does not allow it to pass.</p>
<p>“How long was I gone?” he asks, because he’d never been coherent enough to ask Yennefer while he was with her, his awareness falling and expanding and compressing. A singularity that fills the endless void.</p>
<p>He is so tired.</p>
<p>“Just over two weeks,” Geralt says. A hand is running through Jaskier’s hair, rough and large. When Yennefer had done that it put Jaskier’s body at ease. When Geralt does, it puts his mind at ease instead.</p>
<p>“You were supposed to join us right after stopping the Nilfgaard forces!” Ciri suddenly snaps, shifting to crouch in front of him and catch his eye, just so he can properly see how distraught he has made her.</p>
<p>He reaches out to run his right knuckles over her cheek.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry. Something has changed,” he says, then pulls away his hand so Ciri can see the palm and the glowing spot that bleeds straight through to the back. A firefly caught under his skin, shadows of movement just beneath that should not belong to veins or bones.</p>
<p>Ciri gasps, but it is Geralt who reaches out to take the hand, examining the mark and pressing his thumbs to it. His brows are furrowed, body tightening in to lock up all his feelings-emotions-responses-<em>panic</em> that bubble up and push to get loose.</p>
<p>“One of my brethren has possessed a man by the name Cahir. He... He has holy arrows,” Jaskier whispers, the jolt of feelings-emotions-responses-<em>panic</em> within him rising and stiffening his shoulders. Such a worrier for a Witcher with “no emotions.”</p>
<p>“W-why would one of your family try to attack you?” Ciri asks, her own eyes glued to the hand still in Geralt’s grasp. He doesn’t need to keep holding it, he’s seen what he can, but there is a warmth that blooms from the contact, sweet and gentle as sunny raindrops, that pushes back the crippling fear tied within him.</p>
<p>Jaskier lets him keep holding his hand.</p>
<p>“Not family. Just brethren. One like me. And he did not try to attack me. He tried to kill me.”</p>
<p>“Why would he want to do something like that? Are you enemies?” Ciri presses, wide eyes finally moving to Jaskier’s face. Her panic is louder than Geralt’s, but his is thicker. Heavier. A weight he refuses to lift from himself.</p>
<p>“No, it is simply his time to die.”</p>
<p>“What does that have to do with you?” Geralt growls, a thick sound from his chest, his grip tightening, and Jaskier tilts his head further into his shoulder.</p>
<p>“My brethren do not strive to live as I do. They do not create or build around themselves. 'Unique’ is only a word with no meaning to them, and without individuality, how can one differ from the masses? Even inside their own head?”</p>
<p>“So, it’s his time to die, but he thinks you’re all the same, and wants to kill you too?” Ciri questions and Jaskier peaks over at her, a smile on his face.</p>
<p>“Essentially,” he hums, a rattle in his chest, then closes his eyes, curling in tighter to his Witcher.</p>
<p>There are a few beats of silence and then, “Your kind are really weird.”</p>
<p>“You'll learn to live with it over time,” Geralt mumbles to his child surprise as Jaskier looks to them both, brows raised, before throwing his head back and laughing for all he’s worth. Ciri soon joins in and even Geralt huffs lightly, the line of his shoulders easing.</p>
<p>So much to do, but for now, Jaskier wraps himself up in these people that mean so much to him.</p>
<p>And he chooses love.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>They travel, Kaer Morhen the goal, the snowy peaks thrumming through Jaskier’s chest when Geralt thinks of them. A familiar place, a home when all else has failed him.</p>
<p>“I could help fix it,” Jaskier offers one day, when he can hear the tumbling of stone on broken walls at just the mention of the Witcher stronghold. “If the other Witcher's don’t mind a giant, dark, monster thingy moving around and rebuilding their fortress.”</p>
<p>“They’re tough enough not to be frightened by a glorified ink blot,” Geralt huffs, lighter than he’s been in a long, long time. Ciri feeds that lightness, that good.</p>
<p>“Yennefer called me a slug. You’re calling me an ink blot. What have I done to warrant such disrespect?” Jaskier groans, throwing his head back dramatically, and Ciri giggles where she sits atop Roach. The bard waves a hand at her, only making her giggle more. “And why does she IMMEDIATELY get to ride Roach when I have never been allowed the privilege unless I was oozing out?”</p>
<p>“She’s a child. You’re an immortal, miniature storm cloud,” Geralt continues, tone unchanging, and Jaskier turns to give him a scathing remark that would do the ancient scholars proud, but is cut off by a large hand on the back of his neck. Squeezing. Reassuring. Grounding, but Jaskier doesn’t know for who.</p>
<p>“Thank you for the offer,” Geralt says quietly, honestly. He’s lovely, the way the light envelops him, his halo of love he declines himself growing more vibrant every day. “We can speak to Vesemir when we get there.”</p>
<p>Jaskier stares at him, mouth dry and tacky, hands flexing and twisting as all of his awareness shifts from his body to the man before him. “Sounds good,” he whispers back and Geralt nods, releasing him.</p>
<p>“Too many arms, Jaskier!” Ciri calls suddenly, effectively tearing Jaskier out of the place Geralt had pulled him. He shakes off the unneeded arms, black veins at his neck, as Geralt smirks and faces forward, a silent laugh passing over them all.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The eradication of Nilfgaard’s army comes with a shriek on the wind. Shadows of shadows of men screeching in fury, agony forgotten, a foreign concept stripped away in their lives.</p>
<p>The shriek rattles Jaskier’s brain in his skull, a scream like him but not him, a body not his but his, burned away by a magic that left this world long, long ago. A hit to a system in withdrawal. An echo over the bedrock, a ripple in a flood.</p>
<p>The roar of a wildfire, familiar but not, growing and growing, billowing and mounting and rolling.</p>
<p>Jaskier doesn’t realize he’s stopped walking until hands are on his shoulders, quiver through the air, against his ears. A title-name-endearment. His? He can’t remember. The thrum-roar-death is too loud.</p>
<p>The Nilfgaard army has been properly destroyed. Demolished. Burned by a flame they could never survive. Furious in its glow, beautiful in its destruction, chaos and order set to purpose.</p>
<p>There is a step, but it is not his.</p>
<p>There is a step and she is there.</p>
<p>No portal, no change, Yennefer just stands before them on the road, bloody and worse for wear. Her body is not an echo, it is a source, magic curled within her ribcage like a sated cat.</p>
<p>Geralt and Ciri haven’t noticed her yet, looking instead at the frozen bard and his black eyes. He smiles at her, his heart welling up. Proud. He is proud.</p>
<p><b>“Hi, Yennefer,”</b> he greats and finally Geralt and Ciri look over, clearly not expecting to find a sorceress standing there, her whole frame swaying but her eyes alight with power.</p>
<p><em>“Jaskier,”</em> she replies, her voice thin, like she’s realize how much space she could be taking up but has yet to figure out how. Geralt steps towards her, but stops when she points a finger at him. <em>“I am still mad with you, Geralt of Rivia,” </em>she snaps, but then looks to Ciri and a piece of her flame burns brightly, curling around the girl like it knows her and wants to keep her. <em>“And you must be the child surprise.”</em></p>
<p>“You’re Yennefer?” Ciri questions, eyes wide. </p>
<p>Despite the warning Geralt can’t help but demand, “What happened to you?”</p>
<p><em>“Took out an army,”</em> Yennefer shrugs with one shoulder, like it takes everything she has, and then she steps and she is in front of Jaskier. The startled jolt that shoots through Geralt and Ciri is slightly entertaining. <em>“You,”</em> she points an accusatory finger in Jaskier’s face, but he only smiles back at her, the pride in his chest swelling and swelling with every breath. <em>“What did you do to me?”</em></p>
<p><b>“I did nothing,”</b> Jaskier smiles, black eyes crinkling.</p>
<p>Yennefer bares her teeth and raises her palm. The incantation she whispers is a simple one, a basic one, a familiar one. An orb of fire hovers in her palm, except now the fire glows purple as a flower. It glows like it is <em>alive.</em></p>
<p><em>“This isn’t nothing,”</em> Yennefer snaps.</p>
<p><b>“Of course it isn’t, but it was not my doing,” </b>Jaskier tilts his head, looking to the ember and how it sways and curls like a lethargic waltz. <b>“I simply gave you guidance. It was you who pieced together true magic. Ancient magic. Forgotten by even the dragons and elves.”</b></p>
<p>“It’s beautiful,” Ciri whispers in wonder, coming up by Yennefer’s side, her green eyes glued to the purple flame.</p>
<p><em>“You’re ‘guidance’ was only to say ‘the world is a balance of chaos and order’,” </em>Yennefer’s tone is accusatory, but it only manages to make Jaskier beam even brighter.</p>
<p><b>“And look at what you managed with only that,”</b> he says quietly and finally, finally, the sorceress falters, her rage shivering down her spine until all that is left is her exhaustion.</p>
<p>“Ciri, fetch firewood,” Geralt is immediately saying, a steadying hand on Yennefer’s back, and she allows it. “We’ll make camp just over there. Jaskier--”</p>
<p><b>“Set up our gear?”</b> the bard offers cheerfully, Ciri rushing off to do her own duty. Geralt grunts an affirmative, leading Yennefer to his designated spot, and settling her down.</p>
<p>It doesn’t take long to set up camp and get Yennefer comfortable and resting. Ciri keeps glancing curiously at the woman, a familiarity to them both but a foreign curiosity in their eyes. </p>
<p>“She should come with us to Kaer Morhen,” Geralt says quietly, he and Jaskier sitting side-by-side just across the fire from the princess and the sorceress. </p>
<p>“I agree,” Jaskier nods, the black receding from his eyes and veins, “She might not, though.”</p>
<p>“You should ask her,” Geralt huffs, looking down to his own hands, self-deprecation curling in his head. “She doesn’t hate you.”</p>
<p>“I wouldn’t say she hates you,” Jaskier hums, “Just really, really, really, really, really, <em>really</em> doesn’t like you at the moment.” That earns him a glare, but he shrugs it off. Some of the storm in the Witcher’s head dissipates. “Better idea. We get Ciri to ask.”</p>
<p>“Hmm?”</p>
<p>“Yeah! I mean, have you seen that girl’s puppy eyes? Not even a badass bitch of a sorceress could turn those down,” Jaskier snickers. Geralt grunts in mild agreement, his eyes trailing back to Yennefer’s prone form and Ciri’s silently observant one.</p>
<p>The kiss Jaskier sets on Geralt’s temple surprises even him, like a muscle memory he’d never felt before, a need to do something to ease some of the constant worry building up and up in the stiff pull of Geralt’s muscles. The Witcher looks to him with a mirroring pulse of surprise.</p>
<p>“Get some sleep. I can keep watch,” the bard whispers, carding a quick hand through Geralt’s hair, and he watches as Geralt first stiffens, quivers, and then sags in defeat, not a word spoken.</p>
<p>The Witcher lays himself on his bedroll in an attempt to get some rest and Jaskier leans back, eyes turned black once more, as he keeps track of any who would come near to do his family harm.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The first inn the four of them get to has Jaskier performing, Geralt taking a contract, Yennefer resting in one of their two rented rooms, and Ciri keeping vigil over the sorceress.</p>
<p>When the town is asleep, Jaskier returns to the room he shares with Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri just across the hall, and immediately turns to face a far corner.</p>
<p>“The fuck are you doing?” Geralt questions from where he sits on their bed.</p>
<p><b>“Contacting my brethren,”</b> Jaskier replies, looking back at Geralt with black eyes and a vacant stare, his focus elsewhere. <b>“His body as Cahir perished, the damage by Yennefer’s ancient magic too damning for him, but he has surely jumped to a new body.”</b></p>
<p>Jaskier turns away, facing the corner once more, back to the room as he watches how the two walls mesh, the plains twisting together. <b>“My kind might speak to each other through where the planes intersect. But do not worry,” </b>Jaskier smiles, but he does not turn away, <b>“He cannot track us this way. We are too encompassing, too massive, to track each other.”</b></p>
<p>“Is this a skill that can be taught?” Geralt questions after a beat. It certainly would be helpful if they could all just chat to each other through random corners, but alas...</p>
<p>
  <b>“The only other beings I know to have this ability are cats. You will have to stick to xenovoxes, I’m afraid.”</b>
</p>
<p>“Cats...” Geralt grumbles. “Is that why they’re always staring at walls?”</p>
<p><b>“Mostly,”</b> Jaskier shrugs then, quickly, glances over his shoulder and smiles brightly, <b>“I like to pet them when I see one poking through.”</b> Then he turns back to the corner, serious once more, and the planes part and curve until they are parallel.</p>
<p>Black eyes meet his own and even Jaskier’s brows rise in surprise.</p>
<p><b>“I almost feel like I should thank you, brethren,”</b> he says conversationally as he takes in the new body before him. <b>“I’ve been looking for an excuse to eradicate this one.”</b></p>
<p>Standing there, with a glare as dark as his but churning with freezing fury, is Stregobor, a quiver of holy arrows on his back.</p>
<p><b>“Oh yes,”</b> Jaskier purrs, a roll of molten rocks, fury and glee building up alongside each other as he looks at his new enemy. <b>“This should be fun.”</b></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Hope you all enjoyed this chapter! Less body horror here, more story, but I hope that's cool with y'all!</p>
<p>Chapter Song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIyQDqyml5A">It Will Come Back - Hozier</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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